


Wolf at the Door

by echoinautumn (maybetwice)



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Gen Fic, Genderbending, Genderswap, Intrigue, Moral Ambiguity, Multi, Mystery, Politics, Pre-Relationship, medical drama
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-15
Updated: 2011-11-15
Packaged: 2017-10-26 03:07:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 32,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/277986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maybetwice/pseuds/echoinautumn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three years after the skirmish with Nero, McCoy is working as a medical researcher on the distant Starbase 84 at the edge of the Romulan Neutral Zone. When a mysterious disease begins spreading rapidly through the population of the nearby Federation colony, the Enterprise joins the investigation and uncovers the dangerous truth about the epidemic and the Federation itself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wolf at the Door

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2011 round of Star Trek Big Bang on LJ. I had the best helping me through this--_samalander for her superior betaing and plot wrangling, tprillahfiction for her lovely, lovely art, and ryuutchi for an astonishingly lovely fanmix. I absolutely owe this story to them and their hard work. If it weren't for them, I would have doubtlessly abandoned this story to the wasteland that is my in-progress folder.

The station chronometer in the corner read 2342 as the door closed behind Lenore McCoy when she returned to her quarters that night. She frowned at it and rubbed her hands over her face before retreating to her dressing area. Now more than ever, McCoy had trouble leaving her work behind at the end of the day, even if it interrupted the façade of a normal life that she tried to hold together for the last few years.

She had intended to be back in her room hours before, but had been distracted by her study of the samples from a handful of colonists suffering from an unidentifiable disease that had been stumping their doctors for weeks. As the head of the medical facility on the nearest Federation outpost, McCoy had been asked to join the research for treatment of the infected patients. It had been too late for nearly fifty of the colonists who had died of Saunaed Sidemen before she had taken the case, and while things hadn’t gotten better for many of the others, she had at least managed to keep the rest of them alive.

“Computer, retrieve personal messages,” she ordered and began to undress, listening to the computer voice droning through a list of messages she had neglected to check for several days. She was left wearing only her bra and a pair of unbuttoned, standard issue trousers when the computer reached the series of messages that she was actually interested in.

“Visual message from Joanna Darnell,” the cool computer voice announced, unaware of the significance that the message held. “Subject—”

“Onscreen,” McCoy interrupted immediately and leaned over the small console that had been provided for her. She breathed out when the familiar face of her daughter appeared on the screen, squirming through the first few seconds as she always did.

“Hi Mommy,” Joanna chirped from over a million miles away. She looked so much older than McCoy imagined her whenever she thought of her daughter. McCoy pulled up a chair and sank into it slowly while Joanna told her about the kitten that Josh and his new wife had brought home for her. Josh had mentioned the kitten in another message and though McCoy had suggested Joanna wasn’t ready, he had thought otherwise.

She was left staring at the black screen when the message was over. There was no point in playing it again, but she couldn’t bring herself to tear herself away. It was late and she would be expected back in the laboratory in the morning. There were other messages waiting, though, according to the flashing light on her console alerting her to their impatient demand for her attention.

“Next message,” she sighed and pushed herself up from the chair to finish undressing. The computer resumed the reading of her other messages while McCoy changed into a t-shirt from her Academy days that she kept only for nostalgia’s sake. On a starship on the other side of the quadrant, Kirk had a matching one that he slept in, she knew from the rare video connections they could manage to catch up, usually when the end of their shifts coincided about once a month.

“Message from Captain James Kirk,” the computer said as McCoy loosened her hair from her tight ponytail. She paused and frowned at it again, then swore under her breath. There was another from Kirk waiting in her inbox from a week or more before that she’d never gotten around to responding to. A new message meant that Kirk had noticed.

“Bring it onscreen,” she commanded and bent over the console again, combing her fingers through the curtain of her dark hair while skimming the note from Kirk. He had a way of being perfectly expressive in text alone that was lost whenever the computer read it for her. He wrote her as often as possible, usually longer messages about the members of the crew closest to him, and though McCoy hadn’t seen him up close and in person since her deployment to Starbase 84, before he had left Earth with the _Enterprise_ , she still considered him a closer friend and confidante than anyone else she knew.

 _Bones,_

 _Haven’t heard from you in a few days, though I guess that’s normal for you now. You should really get better at answering these messages. If your commanding officer weren’t so efficient about her paperwork, I’d think you’d died out there at the edge of the Federation. As that’s not likely to have happened, I figured I’d write you again and check on you._

 _The negotiations with the Halkans are breaking down, but there have been a few other incidents in the meantime that have really thrown a wrench in the works. It hasn’t been my best diplomatic mission, let’s say._

 _How about you give me a ring sometime through the transmission system? I haven’t seen your grumpy face in at least a month._

 _Jim_

McCoy read through it again quickly and arched her eyebrows before shaking her head clear. It sounded like he was worried about her, under the guise of bravado. He didn’t often specifically request the chance to talk to her, unless something had happened out on the mission that had shaken him and he needed—or at least wanted—for her to ground him again.

Occasionally, she regretted her decision to turn down Kirk’s offer of a place on the _Enterprise_ as his CMO. Everyone was still a little traumatized from the reminder of their fragile mortality after the incident with Nero and the subsequent tensions with the Romulans. The Federation had been crippled in the aftermath, and Starfleet had only just begun to recover its recruiting numbers three years later. McCoy couldn’t allow herself to overthink the choice to take the opportunity to conduct her own research by commanding the laboratories on Starbase 84, putting her on nearly-equal status with the commanding officer there. And if the admiralty wanted her to conduct subtle diplomacy so close to the Romulan border, then it was the political price McCoy had been willing to pay. Kirk was the one with the admiralty pulling his strings for politics all the time, as she’d heard plenty about since he’d accepted his captaincy.

She rose and straightened her t-shirt over her chest, beginning to braid her hair over one shoulder. “Computer, send a video transmission request to Captain Kirk.”

The computer only flickered for a few brief seconds before the screen changed to reflect the connecting transmission. McCoy brushed her hair over her shoulder and watched as Kirk’s face appeared, too close at first, and then retreating to a suitable distance.

“I was just thinking of going to bed,” Kirk said by way of greeting when the connection steadied. McCoy noticed that he was wearing the same t-shirt as she was, and crossed her arms over her chest to hide the design on her own. He sat in the soft chair in front of his console and smiled at her, the same smile she’d grown used to since they’d separated. It made her feel appreciated, like someone actually enjoyed her company enough to miss it.

“I just got your message,” she said and sat down in her own chair. “From three days ago.”

“I didn’t think you’d call tonight, actually.” Kirk scoffed and rubbed his hand through his hair, causing it to stand on end like a neatly-shorn lion’s mane. “I’d give you hell about it, but I haven’t had time to call you, either.”

When they talked like this, unassuming and relaxed, sometimes enjoying a drink together from across the quadrant, McCoy felt like they had never left the Academy. Kirk reminded her of the same kid she’d met on a shuttle out of Riverside, restless and reckless and hanging onto life as tight as he could, as if he was going to lose control at any moment. He wasn’t the same, and McCoy knew quite well that he wasn’t—at least no more than she was the same embittered divorcee as she had been that day. When Kirk looked world-weary and drained like this, though, she was reminded of his blood-streaked lip and devil-may-care expression; the lingering smell of beer in his clothes that matched the whisky on her breath.

“Tell me what’s going on there, then,” McCoy suggested, reaching for her PADD and tapping in a few items to fulfill the next day.

“Same as usual,” he said vaguely, and leaned closer to his console. McCoy looked up and met his eyes, held his stare for a few seconds, and cleared her throat.

“Busier than usual,” she noted, but he only laughed and shook his head, returning to that intense stare that unnerved her.

“I’m making it work.” Kirk was evading the question, but McCoy wasn’t feeling inclined to let it pass easily. Kirk was likely to ignore his health and push himself over the edge if someone didn’t. In many ways, he was utterly unchanged from the hooligan who had boarded the Starfleet shuttle with her, even if no one was left who believed that but her.

“You don’t look like you’re sleeping enough,” she scolded, pressing him to answer, to take care of himself when no one else seemed to notice that he was struggling to do even that. Kirk smiled from the other side, the stark lights gleaming in his hair.

“Neither are you, Bones,” he teased, his eyes crinkling up with a smile. “Do I have to make you sleep when I see you?”

Her surprise showed clearly on her face for seconds before McCoy could arch an eyebrow and lean her head on her hand. “I’m not seeing you for a while,” she remarked as if she hadn’t been surprised by his previous suggestion. “So you’ll have to content yourself with knowing that I’m at least sleeping and eating enough to do my duties here.”

“That’s what you think.” Kirk waggled a finger at her and turned his head toward the screen. His fingers flew over the touchpad on the other side while McCoy pulled one of her legs up to her chest, stretching the muscles in her legs and watching him work. A moment later, she lifted her PADD and stared at the message he had forwarded to her, skimming through the standard language preceding the orders.

“That’s impossible,” she said, dropping her feet back to the floor and leaning over the console. “There’s nothing here about the _Enterprise_ docking here. Our next projected arrival is the _Intrepid_ , but that’s not for another six weeks.” The orders on her PADD, sent four days before, disputed that and suggested the reason for Kirk’s interest in her call. McCoy looked back up at Kirk, whose expression had changed from smug superiority to match her own confusion.

“I thought Command cleared these things with the commanding officer of a Starbase before they sent the orders to a ship,” he said and grabbed up his own PADD. “I guess I’ll have to talk to your commander there before I show up.” He set it down and looked undisturbed by the whole thing.

“I guess you’ll get to tell me when to sleep, then,” she sighed. “Is that why you wanted to talk to me?”

Kirk looked sincerely apologetic. “I thought you’d know by now, and you hadn’t mentioned it to me. Weren’t you close with—damn, what’s her name again?”

“Commander Grax,” McCoy supplied, thinking of the Betazoid woman who commanded the Starbase, with whom she’d developed a cordial if not particularly close relationship. Then she shook her head and stood up, rolling tension out of one of her shoulders. “If she knew, the rest of the base would know by now.” She walked to the cabinet next to her bed, taking down a short, crystal glass and the bottle of bourbon that had recently been sent from Earth by her father, just in time for her thirty-fourth birthday. Behind her, she could hear Kirk’s hum through the console and she paused to look over her shoulder at him.

“It’s probably nothing,” he said in a distant tone, his gaze elsewhere. Sometimes their conversations went like this, derailed by Kirk’s whimsy, and grounded only when McCoy tried to keep him focused.

McCoy poured herself two fingers of bourbon and shook her head, lifting the glass to him. “If you have to say it’s nothing, it’s probably something.”

Kirk laughed from the other side of their connection. “Trust me, Bones, it’s nothing. It looks like they haven’t let Commander Grax know, that’s all. I’ll send the formal requests through tomorrow to get it all squared away.”

McCoy hummed skeptically and tapped a finger against her glass. “When are you arriving, then?” She braced herself, and when Kirk looked up at her again, she was already expecting anything he could say, even if it meant he was arriving in minutes.

“Three days,” he grinned. “I wanted you to have a week’s notice, since that was all I got. We had to finish the negotiations with the Halkans. We finished there early yesterday.” Kirk shrugged and if he was irritated about the interruption of his missions, McCoy couldn’t tell for more than a moment before it was hidden.

“Talk to Commander Grax,” McCoy sighed and checked the chronometer again. She finished the bourbon quickly and set down the glass next to her console. “I’ve got a shift at 0800 tomorrow. Send me the details when you get them.”

Kirk lifted a glass of his own, filled halfway with a bluish liquid she recognized immediately as Romulan ale. Forbidden most places, but that wouldn’t stop Kirk, and it certainly didn’t stop the colonists who brought it onto Starbase 84 to sell. She rolled her eyes and stood up, arching her eyebrows up to a point when she rested her hand on the touchscreen, just beside the button to terminate the connection.

“Get some sleep, Jim,” she commanded, keeping her expression straight when he smiled charmingly at her. His eyes swept over the screen like he could see her there in front of him, the smile never fading. McCoy shifted her weight to her other foot and looked at him with both eyebrows up.

“I mean it,” she said when he looked up at her eyes again.

“See you in a few days, Bones,” he said and grinned crookedly, tapping the button to terminate the transmission before she could do it herself.

McCoy scoffed and rubbed her face slowly. Three days wasn’t much time at all. She lifted the PADD again and scanned the orders. Either Kirk had sent her the abbreviated version of them, or there wasn’t a specific objective in the document to suggest _why_ the _Enterprise_ had been sent to Starbase 84. _Or_ Kirk was lying and had fabricated the orders entirely for reasons she couldn’t totally pinpoint. Maybe he only wanted to see her. McCoy threw the PADD down onto the desk and shook her head.

“Computer, set alarm to wake for 0630,” she sighed and peeled back the covers to her bunk. She would have to write back to Joanna soon, and talk to Commander Grax sometime during the day, at least to forewarn her about the request coming from the _Enterprise_. “Lights to five percent.”

The lights dropped immediately, and McCoy stared around her room, through the small porthole that looked out to the spinning planet below, and then to the blackness of the neutral zone beyond. Darkness and silence indeed, she thought, and pulled the blankets up to her waist, staring out at the blue planet below, so much like Earth.

*

Halfway through her morning coffee, a young lab tech stepped tentatively into the opening door to McCoy’s office, just barely sticking his head through. He cleared his throat when she didn’t look up immediately, and McCoy finally looked up at him when she’d finished making notes on her PADD.

“Doctor McCoy,” he said weakly, and then his back straightened when she set down both PADD and coffee cup. “I came—I mean, we decided that I’d come because I—I mean—”

“Spit it out, Mendelson,” she said, more irritably than she had intended. His back straightened further, until it he was puffing out his chest ridiculously.

“We’ve finished our analysis of the samples from the colony down in Laboratory Gamma,” he sighed out in a rush and looked relieved when it was out. His body jerked and he held out his own PADD to her. His fingers were shaking, she noticed, when she stood up and took it from him, scrolling rapidly through the results.

When she had referred copies of her samples to Laboratory Gamma, McCoy had hoped that they would find something different than she had. The disease moved fast, resisted all of the standard treatment options, and adapted unusually fast to whatever methods she applied to combat it. The results Mendelson had brought her were no different than what she had suspected. McCoy sighed and handed the PADD back to him. He seemed to relax when she did.

“Stop the treatments we have the patients on,” she commanded and sank down in her chair again. “The disease will adapt to the medication and resist anything else we do with them.”

Mendelson nodded and clutched his PADD. “Doctor, there’s something else,” he said softly. “Three of the patients on the planet died last night. We got word early this morning.”

“Damn it,” she groaned and brought the screen of her desk console to life. At the top of her messages was the communiqué from the planet announcing the first deaths since the case had been transferred to her. For a while, she had allowed herself to believe that it was slowing under her care, that she was preventing their deaths if not curing them entirely. McCoy closed her eyes and counted to five and then stood up.

“Order them to stop the treatments before we kill the rest of them, then,” she said and came out from behind the desk. “Send me the full diagnostics from your tests and confer with the head of Laboratory Delta to find out what their overnight tests have turned out.” She paused and looked at her desk, at the now-forgotten list of things she would have to do. “Upgrade safety protocols. I don’t want risk our samples getting out from the labs, and I don’t want anyone _in_ our labs to get sick.”

“Yes, doctor,” Mendelson said immediately and retreated quickly, gripping his PADD tighter than seemed necessary.

When he was gone, McCoy leaned against her desk and rubbed her fingers over her temples, trying to organize her thoughts. She had a stack of reports to file before she could get into the lab to check on the tests she’d set up overnight for the sample cells, or even on the ongoing experiments that predated the urgency of this, and a report for Commander Grax to pass on to Starfleet Command that she would have to make before the end of the day. Her mind circled back to the impending arrival of the _Enterprise_ and she swore under her breath.

“Computer, locate Commander Grax,” she instructed and reached for her coffee cup. It wasn’t as good as the coffee she could get on Earth, nothing ever was, but McCoy decided that it was too early to deal with all of this without a chemical crutch.

“Commander Grax is on deck thirty-three, in her ready room.” The computer voice was cool and even somewhat comforting, but the tension in McCoy’s shoulders didn’t release as it spoke.

“Send a request for an afternoon meeting with the Commander,” she said instead and drained her coffee cup with a grimace. “Make it a high priority.” The computer paused, and then finally spoke again while she was replacing her empty cup on the table.

“Confirmed. You have a half-hour appointment with Commander Grax at 1345.” Half an hour wasn’t very long, but McCoy had long since learned the art of speaking quickly and succinctly for her commander.

“Remind me fifteen minutes prior.” McCoy left her office and went down the hall to Laboratory Alpha, the one that she rightfully called entirely her own, though she was in full command of the remaining laboratories aboard the starbase as well.

One of the nurses looked up at her from the desk in the corner and smiled. “Doctor McCoy,” he greeted and she nodded to him curtly and went to the station where her tests had been running. A hasty review of the results told her that nothing had changed from what she had already suspected, and she frowned at the screen irritably.

She wasn’t getting anywhere the way she was going about this, but there was plenty to be done before she could draw any substantial conclusions about whatever it was she was dealing with. McCoy settled in and worked in relative silence, pausing only to answer questions and examine reports sent to her station, until the computer chime above her head alerted her to the impending meeting. She squeezed in another five minutes of work before she left instructions with the lab and departed for the commander’s ready room.

Commander Grax was an attractive woman, petite and dark-haired, who demanded excellence from those serving under her at all times. She was gentle by nature, but McCoy had seen her work her way through tough negotiations with Romulans skirting the neutral zone and placate colony leaders with a few well-said but simple words alike. Grax was already waiting by the porthole in her ready room when McCoy stepped inside.

“Lieutenant Commander,” she said and gestured to the chairs nearest the window. When she came closer, McCoy saw that the view looked out on the planet below.

“Commander Grax,” she said and stood at attention near the chair she had been pointed to until Grax smiled and nodded to the chair again. McCoy sank into the chair and held her PADD in her lap.

“You’re tense, McCoy,” she said and poured tea for both of them from a pot that McCoy hadn’t noticed when she had sat down. Experience told her that Grax did her best to avoid reading the minds of her crew, respecting the privacy valued by other Federation species. The commander was especially careful of McCoy’s, having sensed rightly from the start that she was particularly attached to the privacy of her own mind.

McCoy straightened her shoulders and tried to look more at ease, though a single exchanged glance between herself and Grax told her that she needn’t have bothered. “I came to report about the status of that disease we’re studying from the colony.”

“Report, then,” Grax sighed and looked out her window

“As of this morning, we’ve ceased all treatment of the infected colonists for fear of strengthening the pathogen. It’s moving fast, adapting faster than the methods we’ve tried can kill it. I’d like to go to meet the patients myself and evaluate their symptoms in person, in case there’s something about our diagnostics that I’m missing.” McCoy took a breath, and Grax looked back at her with her dark, black eyes.

“I won’t allow that, McCoy,” she said flatly and rested her cheek on her fist. “I need you here, alive and well, not down in the colony. Not until we know how to prevent the disease from spreading.”

Instinctively, McCoy closed her hand tightly around her PADD rather than give into the desire to protest. “With all due respect, Commander, I’m not a very effective doctor cooped up on the base. I would rather—”

“You would rather die in the service of your oath. Yes, I know,” Grax sighed and shook her head. “But I won’t allow it, regardless. You have duties aboard Starbase 84 beyond this particular assignment.”

McCoy hadn’t thought of that at all, and she clamped her mouth shut quickly, her mind flickering back to Joanna’s last message. She had a daughter, and duties beyond those she had to Starfleet or the Federation. “Of course,” she said immediately, and frowned when Grax smiled.

“We will bring two of the colonists aboard, so long as they are placed in quarantine. You will be able to observe them out of the environment in which they were infected. Will that be an appropriate solution?” Grax poured herself more tea and stood up as soon as she saw McCoy’s curt nod.

“That will be a suitable compromise.” McCoy’s throat stuck together as she pressed back the terrifying thought of dying this far out in space, far from home, and berated herself for the cowardly fear.

“On to the next order of business.” Grax turned away and walked toward the window, her slim, tanned fingers tracing the outline of the far-away planet. “The USS _Enterprise_ will arrive in two days. I received Captain Kirk’s formal arrival forms this morning upon waking. I understand you have friends aboard.”

“I also have duties here,” McCoy insisted, and hoped the sudden increase in her heartbeat or the leap of excitement she felt in her twisting stomach wouldn’t give away her excitement. She had served on Starbase 84 much longer than she had ever served on the _Enterprise_ , but she was beginning to feel the wear of long periods in space, far from home. Any reminder of that, especially the arrival of an old friend, was a welcome reprieve. “As you reminded me.”

“Indeed. In any case, Starfleet Command informs me that the mission of the _Enterprise_ and her crew is to assist in your investigation of the disease in our colony.” She tapped her fingers a few times and then nodded, as if she was making a decision for herself. McCoy pretended not to be surprised to hear her words. That certainly seemed to solve the question of why the _Enterprise_ had been ordered all the way to the Romulan neutral zone.

“I wasn’t aware that Starfleet Command had determined that we would require additional aid,” she said instead, keeping her tone as neutral as possible. “The conditions have been bad, but we thought everything was under control until last night. Jim—Captain Kirk told me last night that he received orders four days ago.”

Grax looked over at McCoy, her forehead wrinkled. “I’m afraid that I don’t know, McCoy. You will have to ask Captain Kirk yourself when he arrives. In the meantime, I am assigning a security detail to your laboratory to enforce the quarantine when your patients arrive. I would prefer if you had them transferred before the _Enterprise_ arrives, to avoid a heightened risk of exposure to an entire starship.”

McCoy interpreted that as a subtle dismissal and rose to her feet, holding her PADD against her side. “I will send the formal reports to you before 1500.”

“Excellent, McCoy.” Grax smiled and set down her tea cup. She didn’t look nearly as concerned about things as McCoy felt. “Good luck with your patients. I expect you to report to me every day on this, when you can tear yourself away from the laboratory.” The knowing look she gave her, a half-smile that lifted one side of her mouth, quieted McCoy immediately and told her that the commander already knew that she was working much later hours than she was strictly meant to.

“Good afternoon, Commander,” she said by way of farewell, and left the ready room, her head already back in the laboratory and to the preparations necessary for her patients.

*

The _Enterprise_ arrived with little fanfare in the middle of McCoy’s shift, a mere three hours following the transfer of her patients from the colony planet. She was carefully instructing her patients on the use of the monitoring equipment she’d placed in the quarantine chamber so she would have somewhat reliable results from her observations when the door to the laboratory opened and Jim Kirk strode inside with a cocky grin that she didn’t think was all that befitting of a man on an investigative mission with the kind of gravity they were dealing with.

“Hold it, Jim,” she interrupted before he could even greet her, gently releasing her hand from the button that enabled her to speak with her patients through the tightly-sealed quarantine. McCoy had barely turned back toward the glass before she saw Grax’s reflection walking in after Kirk. She rolled her eyes. He looked vaguely triumphant.

“Mendelson,” she called and beckoned over the tech. “Finish briefing our patients. Make sure they’re familiarized with the settings on the replicator.”

“Doctor McCoy,” Grax said and nodded to her as McCoy approached. It was by strength of will that she didn’t cross her arms in defiance of the lingering stare Kirk was leveling on her. “Captain Kirk wished to see you. I thought it wise to provide him with a tour of the facilities. We ended here, so you might have the chance to discuss your most recent findings with him and segue into further conversations on the matter.” Grax shared a meaningful look with McCoy. She nodded shortly and didn’t look away from Kirk’s face.

“Of course, Commander,” she said and stood still as she turned and left the room, her red uniform stark under the bright white lights. Then McCoy turned to look at Kirk. “I expected more noise out of you when you got here,” she accused, and Kirk shrugged and leaned against one of the nearby tables. He looked tired on closer inspection, the dark circles she’d spied before somehow worse in person. Kirk looked jaded, weary, even somehow older, like some part of his boyish charm had rubbed off from overexposure to the universe.

“Bones,” he said fondly, as if he could hide his cracking façade behind good cheer. As if he could hide it from _her_. For even just a moment, McCoy wished that they were the kind of friends who hugged or held together when things were bad. Kirk might even have been, but she wasn’t. Not with very many people at all, and most certainly not with Kirk. Not when there was the underlying temptation that had lurked under the surface for years, waiting only for opportunity to rear its head and leave a ruin of their friendship in its wake. She had her reasons and she didn’t dare risk it.

Worst of all, she was nervous seeing him again. It was as if she had almost convinced herself that he was just a figment of her imagination who could manifest through her console when she needed him and suddenly he was once again as real as the rest of her life. McCoy could recall very suddenly all the ways in which he had been her most obnoxious and irritating friend in the Academy. She could also just as easily remember all the ways in which he redeemed himself for those times.

“Come on,” McCoy sighed and beckoned him into her office. Once inside, she sealed the door and turned on the holographic projector connected to her console. “I assume Commander Grax filled you in on our status with our situation on the planet?”

Kirk didn’t take a seat as she’d expected him to. Instead, he stood near her and stared down, as if he hadn’t made up his mind about what he thought of her. “Bones,” he said again, and she realized that it was all he had said to her since coming into the laboratory, and nothing else. His cocky grin from before had vanished from his face. The hand that she had raised to point to the holographic projection dropped to her side and closed around the hem of her shirt.

“I haven’t seen you in three years and all you want to talk about is diseases,” he scolded and took a step toward her. She almost took a step back, but caught herself in time to meet his stare with unyielding ferocity.

“That’s what you came here for, isn’t it?” Her voice sounded petulant even to herself and she winced at the implication of it and dropped her voice to a lower pitch, more urgent and serious but no less sincere. “I mean—Jim, I understand, but this is important.” Important, but she didn’t know how much more so than him.

Kirk didn’t let the opportunity pass unacknowledged, which McCoy had somehow expected from him without question. His lips turned up into a genuine smile. Her scowl turned a little darker. “I’ll come visit more often if it makes you feel better, Bones. I’ll even bring flowers if it’ll make you smile a little more.”

They stared at one another for a long, long moment before the tension finally shattered and Kirk started laughing. McCoy allowed a wry smile and a roll of her eyes.

“You didn’t come halfway across the quadrant to flirt with a grumpy country doctor,” she complained as Kirk put an arm around her shoulders.

“I was worried the real Bones had been replaced there for a while.” Kirk sat down in the chair next to her desk and looked up at the hologram, and at her while she made a face at him. “Don’t look at me like that, it’s actually happened. Remind me to tell you about it when we wrap this up and get some shore leave.”

“If this were that easy, I’d have had shore leave long before you got here.” She sat down on the arm of his chair and activated her PADD, controlling the images he was seeing with a deft stroke of her fingers. “Shut up and listen for a minute while I tell you about what we’re dealing with, and you can tell me why Starfleet Command thought I needed a starship captain to tell me how to fix it. Computer, lights to twenty-five percent.”

“Romantic,” Kirk observed, lifting an eyebrow. McCoy ignored him and kept her attention on the matter at hand, despite an unexpected rush of excitement at his implication.

“Focus, Jim,” she grumbled as the image of the pathogen she had been studying for days appeared in the center of the room and rotated slowly. “The symptoms make it moderately contagious. Commander Grax has discouraged the dispatch of a landing party to collect information as a result. Instead, we’ve brought two of the patients on board for further study. It’s not perfect, but we don’t have much choice here. The disease doesn’t respond to treatment, resists heat and cold alike, and can easily be waterborne as much as airborne.”

Kirk stared at it for a long time and didn’t say anything, but then he sighed and kneaded his temple. “So, where did it come from?”

“Unclear,” McCoy sighed and tapped her fingers on the surface of her PADD nervously. The image trembled before them and she swiped her fingers across to another screen displaying several graphs. Kirk made a soft, irritated noise to indicate that he didn’t understand them, but she rolled her eyes and highlighted one of them. “At first, I thought it was a version of influenza that had mutated from contact with one or more of the native organisms on the planet. Further analysis suggested that origin was impossible. I thought it might have been a variant of another disease, but any match in the patterns between this disease and the others we have in our database were subject to an astronomical margin of error. It’s really remarkable, to be honest. If I weren’t dealing with three hundred patients suffering from it, I’d be excited about what it means for medicine.”

Kirk’s scoff caught her off guard, and she looked down at him. He stared at her and shrugged. “That sounds awfully morbid, doesn’t it?”

“Don’t be naïve. Lights at one-hundred percent.” McCoy set down her PADD and stood up. The holograms disappeared immediately as she walked through them. The lights rose quickly, but she didn’t wince the way Kirk did, and sank into a chair opposite of him. “This isn’t an alien disease, Jim. It’s beyond anything I’ve ever seen, but it’s all familiar.”

“What are you suggesting, Bones?” The expression on Kirk’s face was inscrutable and though she tried, McCoy couldn’t match it with her own. His words sounded wooden and hollow, even to her, as they failed to fill the room.

She sighed and looked down at her desk. “I don’t know, actually,” she said. “The symptoms of diseases in various species are generally predictable. If a Human has an infection, whatever the source of that infection, they experience the same symptoms. The same with an allergic reaction.” She nodded meaningfully toward him and Kirk smiled at her, though it was a short-lived thing. “Those symptoms are the result of your body reacting to a stimulus, trying to fight it off. When they appear in a certain order or intensity, we can use them to diagnose a disease if we know what it is.”

“And these aren’t predictable,” Kirk realized aloud, turning toward her with a frown. “Do you know where the first infection occured, anything about your Patient Zero?”

“No idea. Not yet, at least, and not as long as I’m not allowed on the planet,” she sighed. “They don’t know, and I can’t tell them.”

He stood up and looked down at her abandoned PADD on the nearby table. After staring at it for a moment, he picked it up and tapped at the screen. McCoy started to tell him to put it down, but ignored the thought and watched him work in silence until he spoke again.

“I’ll put together a team to go down to the planet.” At her incredulous expression, Kirk grinned and put down the device, easily smoothing over the tense expression he’d been wearing before. “Commander Grax can’t tell me not to do it. If you need something done, then I’m at your command, Doctor.”

“I didn’t mention it because I wanted you to go over her head, Jim,” she bit out and shook her head like she was trying to shake the thought out of her head. “I need an away mission, but I need to be on it. I need to see what’s happening down there.”

“I don’t want to cause trouble by shaking things up in the command here.” Kirk paced back and forth in her office, pausing to look out the window into space. In the reflection of his face, McCoy saw the same focused expression she’d seen him use when solving a complex problem. He turned around and faced her. “What if someone from the medical crew on the _Enterprise_ went down for you? Someone you trusted enough to memorize the information here and understand what it meant in the context down there?”

McCoy quickly ran through a mental roster of the medical staff aboard the _Enterprise_. “Chapel,” she said immediately. “And I want to personally brief each of your team before they leave so they don’t come back infected.”

“When did you get so respectable about the rules?” Kirk touched her shoulder and laughed when she rolled them back to throw off the touch. She pinched the bridge of her nose. Something felt off about the two of them, like they were just a half-beat out of step with one another. Once more, McCoy wondered if she’d made the right decision accepting this particular posting and mused briefly on the notion that she could still request a transfer if she truly wanted it. Kirk could force a transfer if he wanted, too.

“It was you who ignored them to start with,” McCoy sighed and cocked an eyebrow at him. “And you can tell Commander Grax that you’re responsible for this.”

“Anything you say, Bones,” he grinned and started toward the door before she could even bid him a proper farewell. When the door closed behind him, McCoy sank back into her chair and lifted her PADD again, staring at the screen Kirk had been touching before. Then she set it aside and activated the screen on her console once again and went back to work.

*

Grax had been no happier about Kirk’s landing party than she had been at the idea of sending one from the station itself, even though Kirk was ranked higher than she was and was perfectly at liberty to send whomever he liked from his own crew to the planet to conduct a proper investigation.

“Don’t let him push you around, McCoy,” Grax had warned the morning of the party’s departure, after summoning McCoy to her ready room to discuss their plans.

Watching the data streaming back to the laboratory, McCoy considered what Grax might have meant by that. Kirk was as likely as the next Starfleet captain to throw his rank around, she certainly knew from experience and the stories that preceded him. It occurred to her that Grax may have had the right to refuse him full access to her station if he proceeded with the landing party, knowing that it might have undone her careful orders in quarantining the pair of patients she had permitted aboard. McCoy shivered at the thought that followed, that Kirk might have used his clout and his connections to force her will, warranting the warning from Grax. This was a fight she wasn’t particularly excited about getting herself involved in.

When the doors to the laboratory opened shortly after, McCoy half-expected Kirk himself to walk inside with a knowing smile. Instead, she immediately saw that it was Sulu. The doors swished closed and the younger woman looked up at her, her hands at her sides as their eyes met. McCoy felt a stab of disappointment, having expected to encounter Kirk instead, followed by shamed regret at failing to be properly pleased to see someone she recognized and even liked. If Sulu noticed, she had the grace not to say so.

“Doctor McCoy,” she greeted her evenly, with a faint smile. Sulu sounded serious and concerned. “It’s quite a pleasure to see you again.”

“Pleasure’s mine, Sulu,” McCoy sighed and stood up to meet her, leading her into the office. “I’m glad you weren’t sent on the landing party.”

“Not me,” Sulu smiled, crossed her arms and leaned a hip against the counter nearby. “I don’t have anything that could help them look down there. Kirk sent Chekov, though.” Sulu’s voice was as unassuming as McCoy remembered it to be, but there was something more to the piercing stare she leveled on her that could hardly be misinterpreted.

McCoy turned back to her screen with a soft grunt. “You’d be better taking the matter up with Jim,” she said simply, and looked at the newest packet of data being sent back. Nothing abnormal, not yet. “I only asked for Chapel to be sent. The rest were his choice. Spock went, too, if you’re worried about him. He’s not in any serious danger right now.”

“I know,” Sulu said, looking genuinely surprised that McCoy had so easily pinpointed the source of her concern. “And I was concerned about the captain—Jim,” she added, as if McCoy wouldn’t have recognized him by any other name, the way he seemed to forget that her name was Lenore and not Bones.

She set down her hands and frowned at the screen. That hadn’t been exactly what she had expected to hear. The concerns about Chekov, certainly, Kirk couldn’t give it a rest talking about their quiet romance, conducted out of sight as though no one did or could know about it.

“You’re worried about Jim?” she asked and turned around, standing when she was looking Sulu in the face. “He’s on the base, he never went down with the landing party.”

Sulu laughed, tapping her fingertips against her arm. “Well, that’s what I’m worried about. Kirk never misses the chance to go out on these. He would go if Spock tried to tell him it was too dangerous to stay. I thought, since this is a matter involving you, he might go.”

“Don’t try to make something into what it’s not,” McCoy warned her sharply. Then she continued, “Starfleet Command gave the order that he come to investigate. The fact that it’s my laboratory and my base is irrelevant.”

“That’s the thing,” Sulu began, her pink lips pressed together tightly. “I can’t say that it’s totally irrelevant. The whole thing is just really strange, isn’t it? That Command would specifically request the _Enterprise_ when I know that the _Gagarin_ , the _Mandela_ and the _Shanghai_ were all closer than we were.” Sulu fell silent for a moment and looked pensively at the length of the laboratory, as if she was carefully weighing her next words. “Kirk isn’t always so tight-lipped about our missions.”

McCoy crossed her arms. “And he is about this one?” she asked, dropping her voice to a low volume. It seemed logical to her that Kirk might keep some of the details to himself. She had been left with the impression that Starfleet hadn’t wanted news of the epidemic to get very far. Sending the flagship to investigate was perhaps not the most subtle method of dealing with it, but she couldn’t complain. It would get her the information she needed from the planet and that was enough.

“If he’s deliberately putting the crew in harm’s way, he makes a point of letting everyone know what the plan is, what we’re doing somewhere.” Sulu shrugged and looked down at the screen, where the next set of data had been transmitted. The identifying code was followed by _P.A.C., ENS_. They looked up together and Sulu shrugged.

“If it helps your worries, my clearance isn’t high enough to know what the specific mission orders were, myself.” McCoy beckoned Sulu into her office and punched the code for two cups of coffee into the replicator. She set one in front of Sulu, who looked genuinely grateful as she sipped hers black, and locked the door. Then she lifted her cup and clutched it while looking out at the cold, white laboratory.

“The _Mandela_ has a specialized medical crew,” she said aloud, considering Sulu’s previous words about the other ships. “They deal with things like this. I couldn’t figure out why the _Enterprise_ was chosen, but that makes the decision even stranger.”

“I don’t know what the _Mandela_ ’s current mission is.” Sulu frowned, her delicate fingertips—usually so fast and firm with the flight controls of a starship—fingering the side of her coffee cup. “But they usually work missions like this one, medical in nature, conducting vaccine programs, investigating unusual diseases.”

McCoy sank into a chair and abandoned her cup on the edge of her desk. Coffee wasn’t strong enough to alleviate her sudden headache, the sinking sense of wrongness in her stomach. “What about the _Enterprise_?”

“Political,” Sulu answered immediately. McCoy realized that they had finally reached the goal of Sulu’s visit to her laboratory, what she had been hoping the conversation would turn to all along. “The exploratory missions are important, but for the last seven months, we’ve been doing nothing but diplomatic and political missions.”

“Diseases aren’t a political issue,” McCoy said immediately, and her forehead wrinkled with tension. She pinched the bridge of her nose. “We’re dealing with Federation colonists and a screwed up flu strain, not ambassadors and high politics.” When she looked up, Sulu’s expression was soft and nearly pitying, as if she was patiently waiting for McCoy to arrive at a conclusion she had already come to.

“I had a look at the notes you sent to the landing party when I was in Chekov’s room last night,” Sulu said, pressing on to prevent McCoy from commenting on the suggestion underlying her words. Last night, when they were sleeping together because one or both of them thought this was going to be the mission that killed him. McCoy kept her lips pressed together and allowed her to continue uninterrupted. Was that why Sulu was there now, even though she didn’t have anything to do with the investigation? Was she only worried about Chekov, or was there something else? Sulu coming to her didn’t make much sense, but stranger things had happened in the past and McCoy was willing to overlook it.

“It says that the disease resembles none of the typical strains of any pathogen in its whole, but it _does_ represent a great number of them in part. I’m not a doctor, I’m an astrophysicist and a pilot, but—”

“But a lot of diseases have that particular characteristic,” McCoy interjected before she could finish. “I don’t know what it is, you’re right, but if you’re suggesting I’m overlooking something, I can promise that I’m not.”

“I didn’t mean that,” Sulu said mildly, and leaned closer. Her coffee was long forgotten next to her, putting off steam slower as it cooled. “I’m suggesting that this disease isn’t a natural mutation of some other disease that you or any other doctor has dealt with in the past.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” McCoy was unnerved by how close to her own thoughts Sulu’s words were, like some haunting affirmation of her previous concerns.

Sulu rose to her feet and saluted her, having plainly reached the end of her prepared thoughts. Her face was unreadable, deliberately masking her thoughts. “I hope you find something good in that data they’re sending up from the planet.”

“I hope so, too,” McCoy said and followed her to the door, releasing it with her code and walking her out to the door of the laboratory. “Chekov is going to be fine, Sulu,” she added, her hand on the release when Sulu was in the hallway.

The pilot turned and smiled at her. McCoy could hardly help noticing that her forehead was still creased as she did so, her expression concerned and almost pitying. “It’s not Pavel I’m worrying about, Doctor.” Then she turned without further explanation and left McCoy to watch her retreating back.

She was still shaken when pressed the panel beside the door to close it and went back to the screen of her console. Another three sets of data had been transmitted, still without significant results, but McCoy sat down at the console anyway and stared at them, unable to shake the unsettling significance of Sulu’s words.

*

“I called back the landing party,” Kirk said as soon as he stepped into McCoy’s quarters late on the third night of the away mission.

She reached for her robe immediately and pulled it over her shoulders. The two of them had held plenty of video conversations with her dressed exactly like she was, but somehow it was different with Kirk in her room and able to look at more of her than she allowed on the video.

“Why did you do that?” she demanded when the long garment was loose over her shoulders and nearly trailing the floor. She waved him further inside and closed the door behind him, rolling her eyes and watching him pace the length of the room. Something was wrong, and must have been terribly wrong for him to choose to recall the landing party.

“The colonists were becoming restless, and they couldn’t find much else.” He looked apologetic. “I had a look at your reports when I spoke with Commander Grax earlier today. I thought it was better than endangering the landing party more than necessary.”

McCoy cleared up a few things from her sitting area and gestured for him to sit while replacing them on her desk, near her console. She had begun to compose a letter for Joanna, but for the third day in a row it had remained unfinished and waiting for her attention, which she hadn’t been able to spare. That was why she had been a poor parent, McCoy thought and sat in the chair by her desk, her legs and arms crossed defensively. Josh never waited more than a day to respond to McCoy’s messages.

“I need more information than what I’m getting,” she confessed wearily, resting her head in her hands. All her research had begun to point in the direction of confirming Sulu’s hypothesis, but she knew it could have simply been because the suggestion had been nagging her. “What I’ve got just isn’t enough.”

Kirk finally sat down and stared at her, searching her face for the answer to something. McCoy refused to look away. “I’ve seen you do more with less information than you’ve got now,” he observed slowly. “What’s stopping you now?”

“This isn’t like anything I worked on before,” she said hotly, and she felt her stomach sink down. It was too close to her thoughts from before. She wanted to get to the bottom of the mystery surrounding this disease, to see if Sulu was right. “If you’re here to accuse me of not doing everything I goddamn can to make these people better, then you can take your things and get the hell out.”

“I didn’t say that,” Kirk said carefully, and crossed his arms over his chest. His eyes were like beacons, searching her for something. He didn’t trust her, McCoy realized, at least not enough to think she was telling the truth. “I just think there’s more to this business, and I think you know it.”

McCoy’s face became stony, but she looked down at her hands rather than back at Kirk. “Have you talked to Sulu about this, then?”

“Sulu?” Kirk’s voice was genuinely surprised, and she looked up as he leaned closer. “What does Sulu have to do with this?”

“She mentioned it to me first,” McCoy said and stood up again. She was too restless to stay seated. Kirk looked the same, but he stayed in his chair. “That there might be something more to this than I was addressing. I’d never seen anything like this before, but I’m a doctor, I don’t deal in espionage.”

“Wait,” Kirk interrupted and held up a hand to stop her. “Sulu suggested this might be some kind of plot?”

“Sulu suggested that it wasn’t a natural disease,” McCoy snapped, turning around and meeting his eyes. They were bright with curiosity and shining with the thrill of it, as if he had just discovered something particularly interesting. She cursed him silently and hauled her robe back onto her shoulder.

“Sulu doesn’t have clearance to this level of intelligence,” he said slowly. “And what about the disease? Is it natural?” Something in his tone suggested that he already knew the answer before he asked.

“It’s not,” McCoy confirmed grudgingly. “I thought the landing party might find something that confirmed it one way or another, but it doesn’t make sense. This is a remote colony, there’s no way it could be strategically important enough to…” Her words trailed off when Kirk’s eyes flashed again mid-sentence, and she realized.

“To mean anything?” Kirk finished for her grimly. “Except it could be. Think, Bones. _Think._ ” He stood up and brushed past her, accessing her console with his own codes and ignoring the disgruntled noise of protest she made as he did. With seconds, he had highlighted the section of the quadrant that Starbase 84 was in. “Magnify,” he commanded, and stepped back in time for the holographic projection to burst forth just where he had been standing.

“Dim lights to fifty percent,” McCoy said by answer, never removing her eyes from the three-dimensional map Kirk had brought up. There was a fluorescent marker to show their location. Just beyond it was the unlabeled, empty space that she knew was the Neutral Zone.

“Romulans?” she asked incredulously, dragging her eyes away from the map to look Kirk in the eye where he was already staring at her. McCoy shook her head irritably. “But we’ve had a standing treaty with them for two years already. And even if we didn’t, they don’t have that kind of medical technology, don’t you remember the report we got back from the Starfleet Surgeon General?”

“Computer, end hologram.” Kirk didn’t answer her question when the glowing hologram disappeared and left them in the semi-darkness.

Her lips tightened and she rubbed her forehead. “This is crazy. You don’t have any proof at all, we can’t _prove_ this is anything but a disease gone awry.”

Kirk leaned against the console and stared at her, his arms crossed. He seemed to fade into the shadows when he wore his black uniform, which she thought he’d taken a particular liking to since his first stint in command. “You wanted to know why the _Enterprise_ was sent to investigate,” he said plainly, confirming everything Sulu had hinted at in a single, succinct statement. “We don’t have enough information to start an incident yet, obviously, but we need to find some.”

“Then why did you pull back the landing party?” she demanded. “We’re not going to get a damn thing done this way, it doesn’t _matter_ where the goddamn disease came from!” Just as quickly, McCoy tried to pull back her temper before it got the best of her. She was tired, stressed, and overworked. Spies, political intrigue, it was all over her head. She looked out the window to the planet again and thought how peaceful she had once found it, so reminiscent of a far-off home that she missed more than ever before at that moment.

“We need to regroup,” Kirk told her in a quiet, even voice that seemed to suggest that she was coming apart, losing her cool. His hand rested heavily on her shoulder like a weight. “If we have an idea of what we’re dealing with, then we should work as fast and as smart as we can, right?”

McCoy closed her eyes, sending away the image of the lovely planet below, and counted slowly in her head. “Right,” she echoed as her pulse slowed.

“We’ll deal with this one thing at a time. You always wanted me to be more rational about things, right?” Kirk’s mouth turned up into a slight smile at the mention of the way things were, long before they were complicated by distance and politics and the inner workings of the Federation.

Finally, McCoy shrugged off his hand and pulled her robe tightly around herself. “Fine,” she muttered. “I’ll talk to Commander Grax in the morning about forming a new landing party from the Starbase.”

“Don’t do that,” Kirk said immediately. Their eyes met, and she arched an eyebrow skeptically. “Let me talk with the landing party, and then we’ll decide together who should go on the next one, and when.”

“I have a meeting with Grax tomorrow anyway,” she said and started to the door, deliberately ushering him out. “I’ll talk with you afterward and we can keep planning then, all right?”

“I’ll see you then,” Kirk sighed and turned in the doorway to stare at her. McCoy recognized the wistful expression, the same one she’d seen from Josh before, the same one she’d seen dozens of times from someone she’d disappointed in some way or another. McCoy had learned to expect nothing else from herself, but somehow things had always seemed different with Kirk—with Jim. There were never any real expectations between them, just the ever-present goal to be _present_ and available as a friend. McCoy’s expression softened a little, and she rested her hand over his.

“We’ll work it out, Jim,” she promised with a smile she could hardly maintain, still worked up by his confirmation. “I don’t want to wait any longer than I have to.”

“Bones,” he said and pulled his hand out from beneath hers and rested it on her shoulder. “You should let someone look after you while this is going on.”

“I can look after myself, thanks,” she said dryly and removed his hand. He had the decency to look sheepish, but he tucked his hand at his side and smiled at her. “Good night, Jim.”

“Good night,” he repeated back to her and stole one last look before he disappeared down the hall.

If she knew him well enough, and McCoy thought that she did, he would post guards at her doors if he thought she needed protecting. She scoffed and turned back into her quarters with her lips taut. It wasn’t as if McCoy needed Kirk’s protection at all.

*

The emergency came the very next morning came while McCoy was still in her sonic shower, scrubbing the last of the night’s lingering grime from her eyes when an emergency klaxon flared to life in her bathroom. Not a station-wide alert, she realized while fumbling with the switch on the shower, but an emergency alarm for her alone. She swore violently and stepped out, slamming her hand down on the access panel she had in her bathroom.

“What’s happening?” she demanded, and there was nothing but silence for a long moment that left the hollow whine of the station echoing through her ears. Finally, a voice came back from the other side that she recognized as one of her laboratory technicians. McCoy closed her eyes and tried to identify the woman, but came up short for a name.

“Doctor, we need you in quarantine for a medical emergency,” the tech said into the speaker, and hesitated. “Quickly, please.”

The hushed urgency of her voice sent McCoy into a rushed flurry of activity, even as she felt a chill through her.

“I’m on my way,” she answered and was dressed and pelting down the hallway within moments. Under normal circumstances, she might not have allowed a subordinate to keep her out of the loop, but if something was going wrong in quarantine... McCoy picked up her pace and burst into the laboratory.

“What’s happened to the patients?” She had not even needed the time to speculate on what had happened. The expressions on her techs’ faces were confirmation of her concerns. “Where are they?”

Mendelson was standing near the entrance to the quarantined room, looking dazed and resting his hand on the nearby counter. “Doctor,” he said in a soft voice, as if he was afraid to tell her what she already knew; as if he had never experienced death before. The other techs were silent around the two of them. McCoy swore quietly and stepped past him toward the quarantine, only to be grabbed back by one of the security officers, who shook his head slowly. She recognized him very faintly as one of Kirk’s officers, and her face hardened as he spoke to her.

“We cannot allow you to enter, Doctor.” He looked uncomfortable maintaining eye contact with her.

“I’m their doctor,” she said coldly and pushed past him again.

“They’re dead,” Mendelson finally added, having found his voice again. McCoy turned and stared at him. “Just minutes ago, they went into anaphylaxis.”

“Anaphylaxis from what?” Her stares were unmet around the room, and McCoy stared through the viewing glass, where two of her nurses were working, wearing thick suits to protect them from the atmosphere of the quarantine. “That was a sterile room. There shouldn’t have been anything that could have affected both of them.”

“We haven’t determined yet.” The same tech who had answered her from her room spoke now, and when McCoy looked at her, she identified the woman as a young nurse who had been very recently sent to Starbase 84 for her clinical work. McCoy recalled that her name was Gupta before she focused her orders on her. Mendelson was drifting on the edges of the group. She would have to talk to him later, to walk him through some of the rudimentary training she’d received in medical school in dealing with death.

“Prepare them for autopsy,” McCoy heard herself say from a far-off distance. “I’ll need assistance later.”

“I will, Doctor,” Mendelson offered, looking up from the floor, but McCoy shook her head immediately. He still looked like he’d faint at any moment, and she needed a steady pair of hands during autopsy if she planned to have a successful study of what had killed her patients. Her blood ran cold at the thought that it wasn’t a natural extension of the disease, but some sort of foul play—but what purpose would killing a couple of patients serve? She shivered at the thought.

“No, Mendelson,” she said hollowly. “Contact Captain Kirk, ask for Christine Chapel.” Her eyes turned to Gupta again, who nodded slightly, as if she understood the impending order and was bracing for it. “Gupta, I want you to assist as well.” Her remaining orders were delivered swiftly and easily, and when it was done and they had mostly scattered, McCoy stood alone in the center of her laboratory and stared at the door to the quarantine room.

“Mendelson,” she called to him, and felt a pang of regret when his skinny frame tensed before he turned back toward her. “When you speak with the Captain, inform him that our meeting will continue as planned.”

He nodded wordlessly and hurried away. McCoy would need to speak with Grax immediately, but her prior knowledge of the woman told her that she would be better if she could address her with a report in hand. The autopsies would have to come first, but when McCoy entered her office and found Grax waiting there for her anyway, she knew that news must have travelled much faster than she had anticipated.

“I received word about your patients, Doctor,” Grax said in her inimitably calm manner that for a moment reminded McCoy strongly of Spock. “I imagine you have not identified the cause of their deaths?”

“Anaphylaxis.” McCoy walked past Grax and replicated them both a cup of coffee, which the commander accepted with a grateful smile, but did not sit down. “When Nurse Chapel arrives and Gupta is prepared, we will begin autopsy.”

“Surely such barbaric measures are not necessary, doctor?” Grax looked genuinely surprised over her cup of coffee. “I had not thought that was your style.”

“Autopsy doesn’t mean the same thing it did in the Middle Ages,” McCoy grumbled and started up her desk console, though of course Grax would have known that. Automatic reports filled the screen, along with a few messages delivered through official channels—one from Kirk, two from Starfleet Command. McCoy turned away from the screen. She felt calm still, objectively aware that she was either handling the chaos with a deft hand or in shock. With luck, coffee and perseverance would see her through in case of the latter. “I want to do more intensive scans than the machines are typically used to doing. Nurse Chapel is a good second pair of eyes to spot anomalies. I haven’t exactly been treating regular patients for a while now. Gupta is familiar enough with our disease to spot important distinctions. I don’t want to miss anything.”

Grax made a humming noise that McCoy interpreted as approval. Her fingertips tapped the curve of her cup. “None of the other victims suffered sudden changes to their immunoreactivity.”

“That would be a damn terrible way to go,” McCoy grimaced. Suddenly, it didn’t seem so unlikely that someone might have murdered her patients. It might have even been the same person who might have infected them to start with. She’d certainly read of diseases that could put an immune system on high alert, attacking even for typical interactions. She had never heard of something so sudden, or so severe. “No, I think there was a change to their atmosphere.”

“I thought it was a clean room,” Grax said serenely, sipping from her cup and regarding McCoy intensely. She knew, or she suspected, and she had been trying to determine whether or not McCoy had suspected the same. When she lowered her cup again, she looked calm and commanding as ever. “I will ask Security to access their records to determine who has had access to those patients within the last twelve hours. Direct your staff to conduct tests on that room while you finish the autopsy procedures. Report to me immediately when you have both prepared.”

“Yes, Commander,” McCoy said immediately and frowned at her coffee. Foul play just didn’t make sense, not for her patients; not in her laboratory. Sometimes McCoy thought she was too far removed from her role as a _doctor_ while she was off as a researcher, but it was all the more apparent now as she stared at Commander Grax. “You think someone killed them.”

“I am certain someone killed them,” Grax answered. “I have read every one of your reports, McCoy, and none of them suggested that these victims have ever been immunocompromised to this degree. We have no reason to believe that this is the deadly peak to our disease. No other victims have died remotely close to this way.”

Before she asked the same question she had been pondering only a moment before, McCoy hesitated and set down her coffee, pacing to the door and locking it to the two of them alone. Only then, certain that no one but Grax could hear, she turned toward her. “Why would someone kill them?”

“Surely you can think of a few reasons at your most cynical, McCoy. Perhaps even with only a little effort you might be able to imagine why someone may wish to kill your patients.” Grax’s smiled seemed only partly genuine. “You have been growing ever nearer to a vaccine, if not an outright cure, and these deaths happened just after an investigation was carried out on the planet.” McCoy couldn’t have missed the implicit statement beneath her words; that she had not authorized the investigation herself, and had wholeheartedly disapproved of it from the start.

“After the landing party had already returned without finding anything,” McCoy countered hotly. “Are you really suggesting someone is trying to scare us?”

Grax sighed and replaced her coffee cup on the replicator, where it would be atomized momentarily. “I don’t think anything is beyond the realm of possibility, McCoy. Captain Kirk has been very vocal about his thoughts on all this, even before the events of this morning. I imagine he will be all the more convinced of his theories when he hears of this.”

“You don’t think this has anything to do with the Romulans,” McCoy concluded immediately.

“I do not,” she answered and crossed her arms. “I am quite certain that this is not their work at all, and you would also benefit from the prudence of avoiding the sort of accusations that could rekindle animosity between the Federation and the Empire.”

Commander Grax had spent a number of years in command of Starbase 84, many of which had come before McCoy had arrived. She had been placed in her position before, when suspicions had been heavily cast on the Romulans and their technology after the attack on the _Kelvin_ , and those suspicions had diminished only gradually over the previous three years, after the revelation that the Romulan Star Empire, reclusive as it was, had not been responsible for the _Kelvin_ , or any of the attacks since attributed to Nero. It was difficult to say whether her prolonged contact with the Romulans made her more likely to predict their involvement, or sympathetic to their causes.

“Starfleet Command must think it is, if they’ve sent the _Enterprise_ ,” McCoy said and was very glad that she had already sealed the door. It felt traitorous to bring this up, to doubt Kirk and discuss his theories as if they were striking them down. “I don’t know how you can suggest that my patients were just murdered under my nose and it _isn’t_ somehow related to the same investigation that Command ordered.”

“I know this is difficult, McCoy.” Grax’s voice was comparatively soft, though her tone was firm. McCoy took a step backward toward her desk, regretting her insubordination. “Allow me to deal with the political implications while you deal with this disease. Your orders are as before. I will have to contact the elders on the planet and inform them of today’s deaths. Perhaps they will be able to persuade volunteers to come aboard the Starbase to continue your testing.”

“Yes, Commander,” McCoy said woodenly, her temper seething beneath the surface of her emotions. Grax’s logic made little sense, or there was something she was leaving out deliberately. At least Sulu and Kirk had seemed convincing with their theories. Grax retreated to the door, unlocking it with her own passcode, and McCoy followed after her.

“McCoy,” she said, turning toward her with one hand on the release for the door. “Be careful around Kirk.”

“With all due respect,” she said as they emerged into the laboratory. Grax’s eyes swept the room quickly before returning to McCoy’s face. “You aren’t the first person to tell me that.”

“I don’t mean be careful of his philandering,” Grax said with a half-smile. McCoy’s forehead wrinkled immediately in an attempt to mask her embarrassment. “I mean be careful of him and the excitement he stirs up in his wake. There is something amiss on my starbase, and the very last thing you or I need is James Kirk here to make things worse.”

The two of them parted ways after that, and when McCoy emerged into the room appropriated for the autopsy, she hardly had time to look relieved to see Chapel waiting there, already cleaned and prepared next to Gupta.

“Let’s finish this quickly, ladies,” McCoy said to them curtly, rolled back her sleeves, pulled on her protective gear and scrubbed her forearms vigorously under a sonic faucet. The two women followed her into the room. Her former patients looked peaceful under the lights, as if they were quietly resting rather than victims of murder. _Potential_ victims, McCoy reminded herself severely.

The examination proceeded as normally as it could have, revealing virtually nothing beyond what McCoy had entered it expecting to find until the end.

“Doctor.” Chapel’s voice cut through the hum of the machine as it finished the fourth scan of their second patient. McCoy looked up at her immediately and frowned, walking around to look at the screen Chapel was examining. “Did you give either of these two vaccines while they were here?”

“Which one?” McCoy asked immediately, leaning over the screen. She hadn’t given them any medications for fear of exacerbating their disease as had happened in the patients before. Chapel stood aside from the screen and allowed McCoy to scan it quickly.

Most of the readings were normal for her prior observations, but in the corner of the screen the computer readout began analyzing the disproportional concentration of the vaccine for Klingon Augment Virus. That particular vaccine was notoriously unstable for humans, sending many into anaphylactic shock with even the slightest overdose. They were weak, and their immune systems reacted strongly in response, with terrifying efficiency. It was an easy way to kill a sick patient, and not a pleasant one.

“What the—” McCoy said and tapped a few commands into the console. “No one was supposed to administer any medicines at all to either of these two,” she said firmly and looked up at Gupta, who was wide-eyed. “Check the replicators and see if anyone—anyone, anywhere on this station—accessed this vaccine in the last few days.”

Gupta nodded, stripped off her gloves, and hurried to a nearby console. After a moment, she shook her head. “Nothing—I tried anytime in the last six months, but none of the matches on that list corresponds with the codes used to access the security system to the laboratory.”

It had been too easy. McCoy shook her head and gestured to the door. They stepped out into the main laboratory and McCoy shucked her protective gear immediately. Chapel followed, her eyes held on McCoy as she did.

“Gupta, let the staff know that they can resume preservation of the bodies,” McCoy ordered and nodded to dismiss the woman.

“Captain Kirk will want a report about this, Nora,” Chapel murmured, her arms crossed and holding her suit against her uniform. “I should go give it to him.”

McCoy nodded and looked at her sadly. “I’m sorry we haven’t had time for a proper reunion, Christine,” she sighed and dragged a surgical mask away from her mouth. “When this is over, we should have a drink and talk about the old times in the Academy.”

Chapel’s mouth turned up genuinely, and she squeezed McCoy’s arm warmly. “Until then, Nora, keep yourself together. Rest when you can.”

“No time for rest,” McCoy laughed and pushed back her hair from her face. “I slept plenty last night, and there’s too much to worry about now to keep going to sleep.”

“If you say so,” Chapel sighed and waved to her. “I promised the Captain,” she explained hastily as she left, her footfalls echoing down the hallway to McCoy.

She returned to her office to find her coffee cold and abandoned on the desk, but McCoy ignored it and walked to her console. Her report would be delivered in person later, but she opened a message to Commander Grax and stared at the blank screen for a few, long moments before she began to type it in.

 _Commander,_

 _Klingon Augment Virus vaccine in high quantities, administered directly into the air. There is no physical evidence indicating a perpetrator, nor any overlap in those who have synthesized the vaccine in the replicator and those with access to the patients last night. Possibly received through some physical delivery. Full report this afternoon, anxiously awaiting response._

 _Lt. Commander McCoy_

She stared at it for a long time before sending it on, her eyes lingering on the last three words. Anxiously awaiting response. McCoy scoffed and turned away from her console. She had plenty to think about without Grax’s response to complicate things. She needed to work it out on her own, to figure out what was happening, or why, and just who had a stake in setting forth on this path when it meant killing thousands of innocent colonists and possibly instigating full-scale war between the Federation and the Romulan Star Empire.

“Message received,” her computer chirped at her, and McCoy looked down at it to see Grax’s response appear across the top.

 _Understood, McCoy._

*

“I want to lead another landing party on the planet,” McCoy announced during a lapse in conversation. Grax had arranged a meeting between herself and Kirk and asked relevant members of the _Enterprise_ crew to join them, along with McCoy herself. Conversation had been intense, but ultimately everyone had agreed that there was a rising danger on the base that would need to be dealt with, and quickly.

“We didn’t find anything useful on the last one,” Kirk said, his mouth tight with irritation that had been building over the past hour. “It’s a waste of resources, and frankly, we’ve just discussed how dangerous things are here without you putting yourself in direct harm, Bones.”

Behind him, McCoy saw Grax’s masked expression, curved in a soft frown. McCoy had a sense that she was deliberately strategizing in direct opposition to Kirk, and when she spoke, she leaned forward and kept her voice low and even. “I think we should do it,” she announced. “And no resources from the _Enterprise_ will be wasted, Captain. Doctor McCoy is perfectly qualified to lead the party herself.” She nodded to McCoy once. “I have seen her field tests from the Academy. If any danger arises, her combat skills will be perfectly adequate to handle the situation.”

“Combat skills I taught her,” Kirk muttered, loud enough that no one could have missed his words, but soft enough to be dismissed without comment. “This is a bad plan, Commander.”

“Jim, we need to do this,” McCoy told him firmly. “You know I’m the last person in this room who would choose to leap without looking, but this is important. There are people down there dying, and people here who are in more danger because of—whatever started this. We need to know that we can rule out foul play.”

“We won’t,” Chekov interjected and drew stares from around the room. Next to him, Sulu tensed, her slim fingers tightening on the tabletop. “We know what is to blame for this, why are we wasting our time discussing it?”

“Because, Ensign,” Grax told him softly. “This is a matter of utmost delicacy. If we misstep and accuse the wrong parties, then we will have a political incident on our hands that we will not be able to put back into the box, shall we say?”

Chekov blushed and fell silent. McCoy looked around the room with a frown. Spock was the next to speak, the first time McCoy remembered seeing him, involved in this. She had been left with the impression that Spock had been handling business aboard the _Enterprise_ while Kirk was occupied with this.

“Commander Grax is correct about our delicate situation with the Romulan Star Empire,” he said coolly. Everyone in the room straightened; he was the first to outwardly say what everyone had been thinking. “It is equally possible that we are dealing with another race, another organization that may have entirely different goals, to include damaging relations with the Romulans.”McCoy didn’t think she imagined the expression of betrayal on Kirk’s face when he looked at Spock, before he managed to mask even that.

“So, I’ll lead the landing party tomorrow at 1000 ship’s time tomorrow,” she announced carefully. “I want Mendelson on the team. He’s familiar with the whole case.”

“I’m coming along,” Kirk sighed, defeated. “Chekov, you’re on, too. You’ve been down there before.” He leveled his stare at McCoy, which she met sharply. There was tension there, something she hadn’t expected between them. He was angry. “I’ll leave Chapel in charge of your tests, if you want.”

“Gupta will handle those. Do you agree, McCoy?” Grax interjected firmly, her stare seeming to remind McCoy of her place aboard the base. McCoy’s head ached. She had little patience for the political bickering between ranks. It explained a lot of Kirk’s deliberately stubborn orders that contradicted Grax’s, and Grax’s suspicions of the higher-ranked Kirk.

“That’s fine,” McCoy said sharply and stood up. “It’s late,” she announced, and the mood of the room broke abruptly. Spock left after murmuring his farewells, and Kirk followed Grax into the hallway, calling her name. More political posturing, McCoy thought and collected her PADD containing her notes and research. It was keeping her away from her job, obscuring her goal to successfully deal with the outbreak. She should have made far more progress than she had, but she hoped that the away mission on the following day would offer some clarity.

McCoy had just begun to step out of the conference room when her name, spoken quiet enough to avoid stares but loud enough to assert its importance, caught her attention. She turned and found Sulu approaching her with the same intense expression that McCoy recalled from before. Her head was still buzzing with plans for the landing party, and aching from the subtle tension apparent throughout the entire meeting. Sulu was feeling similarly, she thought, judging by her furrowed brow and then hand she used to grip McCoy’s arm.

“Could you walk with me to the cafeteria?” she asked, looking as though that was not at all what she really wanted to discuss with McCoy. Certainly enough, when they were around the corner and beyond earshot of the rest of the group, Sulu turned serious.

“You’re taking Chekov down to the planet again,” she observed in what she must have believed to be a neutral tone. McCoy scowled and folded her hands behind her back as they walked toward the turbolift. They were going the opposite direction of the cafeteria, but it was more likely than not that Sulu already knew that.

“He volunteered to go,” she said irritably. “I’m not planning to let anything happen to him now, either, Sulu, and I’d like it a little better if you laid off me about it.” McCoy stopped in the hallway and stared at her. “He’s not all that old, but not that much younger than you, or even Jim, for that matter. And I’ll bring him back just the same as all the others. Don’t you people think I’m damn tired of people dying on my watch already?”

Sulu grimaced, and led McCoy down a short hallway that ended abruptly. “It isn’t that,” she said quietly, looking over her shoulder. “Really, it isn’t. He can take care of himself at least as well as I can. What I’m concerned about is how _interested_ he was in going. The rest of the last landing party was hesitant to go at all, and when they got back, most said their concerns had been completely validated.”

“Chekov’s sense of fun and adventure is a little skewed,” McCoy retorted. “So is Jim’s, for that matter. You accept that he’s a little more foolhardy than most and get on with life planning to patch him together whenever he gets in over his head.”

“They’re in over their head,” Sulu said frankly. “So are we. I know the commander here doesn’t think much of it, but there is more than what we’re seeing, and I’m not willing to buy into her random psychopath theory for all this. It’s too…”

“Perfect,” McCoy supplied and groaned. “I’m a _doctor,_ Sulu, I’m not equipped to deal with this kind of thing. I don’t know what it means when Chekov and Kirk start acting a little funny, they always seem a little funny in the head to me.”

“Keep an eye on him while you’re down there, then,” Sulu said as they emerged back into the main hallway and stepped onto the turbolift. “Something isn’t right. I don’t know what it is, but something’s not right about the way he’s acting.”

“Babysitting,” McCoy groaned as she stepped off the turbolift and turned back toward Sulu. “Just what I wanted to be doing.”

She returned to her quarters and stared at the room, which was clean but a little worn and scuffed from usage. Not at all much unlike McCoy herself. She flipped on her personal console and stared at the blank screen for a long time before she could make up her mind to read through her personal messages for the first time since the _Enterprise_ had arrived. Buried between a heap of other messages McCoy cared about, but simply not as much as her daughter, she found a newer message from Joanna, and a few others from Josh that she couldn’t have simply thrown out, even if she wanted to.

McCoy chose to save the message for later, after she had scrubbed herself clean of the day and changed into her same, comfortable sweats. Then she sank down in front of the console and opened the message.

It was short, sweet, and full of the charming smiles that McCoy loved most about her daughter, if only because they banished the memory of Josh’s identical smile whenever she thought of it. Joanna far outstripped anything about her father. Or her mother, for that matter, McCoy thought. She had just considered doing some reading, or heading straight to bed, when a notification appeared to inform her that she had a pending video connection with the Darnell household. She accepted immediately, without thinking, and swore softly when Josh’s face appeared on the screen. She was wearing pajamas, hardly a classy demonstration for their daughter, and her knees curled up to her chest.

“Is it evening there, Josh?” she asked, because she didn’t have anything else to say to him, and because her sense of times between the starbase and Earth, especially Earth back home, were skewed out of place.

“Same as there, Lenore,” he sighed and looked up at her. As usual, McCoy felt like he was judging her, for her ability to adapt to things as they were. She straightened her back and held his stare for a long time. “Joanna’s finishing her bath,” he sighed finally. “I thought you might like to talk to her, since it’s been a while.”

McCoy remained mute when she nodded, and it took her a moment to unstick her throat. “Wait,” she said just as he was beginning to stand up. She was used to reminding him that life was busy here, but so was his life, and he had time to take care of Joanna. She may not have enjoyed talking with her ex-husband, but he had always been good at giving startling, often harsh, perspective on her life. Even now, especially now, six years removed from their divorce, McCoy had no qualms admitting that to herself, or to him. And Josh had the benefit of being the only person she knew who was truly removed from the ongoing intrigue on Starbase 84.

“Yes?” Josh looked at her with his eyebrows up, and he looked nervous, like she was an unstable time bomb waiting to go off. He had accused her of that before, but the expression in his eyes suggested that the thought had occurred to him again, or that he was conflicted by having any personal conversations with McCoy that weren’t related to their daughter.

“I—” Her voice seized when she tried to speak, and she shook her head reluctantly. “How are things going there?”

“They’re fine, just like always, Lenore.” Josh looked suddenly impatient with her. “Is something going on there?”

McCoy hesitated, weighing the importance of her confidentiality against the growing case for something disastrous on the horizon. She chided herself for that thinking, it was the kind of save-the-world-or-die thinking that got Kirk into the heaps of trouble he did. “There’s an epidemic on the planet,” she explained.

“And you’re saving the world like always, so you don’t have time for—” Josh interrupted, his face changing abruptly from mild curiosity to impatience.

“That’s not what I’m trying to say,” McCoy stopped him hotly, her face flaming red and her blood pressure rising. “I know I’m a damn terrible parent, you made sure everyone knew that when we got divorced! I’m trying to tell you to be careful with Joanna, because things are getting rough out here.”

They were both quiet for a moment, and from behind him, she could see Clara Darnell—Josh’s new wife—poking her head in and frowning, retreating when she the screen. Josh looked back at her, and then to the screen while McCoy tried to compose herself.

“You’re not actually in any danger, are you, Nora?” His voice dropped and McCoy felt her stomach twist at her nickname, which he hadn’t used in a long time. “You’re not going to get sick out there?”

“It’s not that. People are being murdered,” she answered, folding her hands in her lap. The stab of homesickness rose again in her chest and she squeezed it back down. She couldn’t regret anything now, not when there were people relying on her. “Starfleet Command sent the _Enterprise_ to investigate the source of the epidemic and all we’re coming up with is… is spies, or something.”

“The _Enterprise_ is commanded by that—your friend, right?” Josh looked like he was struggling to follow what she was saying, but McCoy appreciated even the effort. He heartily disapproved of Kirk, especially after he had tagged along home to Georgia with her once during their tenure at the Academy and spent several days filling Joanna’s head with nonsense. At least, that was as far as Josh was concerned.

“Jim’s here, yes,” she said stiffly, and wondered if he was trying to imply that Kirk had been stirring things up after his arrival. It seemed like that, that his arrival had come just as things had begun to heat up, either because chaos followed Jim Kirk like a shadow or because he had impeccable timing. “Jim’s not the problem, though. The problem is that I don’t know who I’m supposed to believe, everyone has their own ideas of what’s happening.”

“Nora,” Josh interrupted and shook his head. Clara stepped into the room again behind him, but Josh didn’t turn toward her or acknowledge her just yet. McCoy met her eyes over Josh’s shoulder and nodded slightly, imperceptibly. “You nearly died following this Kirk guy before—you nearly lost your commission three years ago because of his crazy plans,” he reminded her sharply, drawing her attention back to the conversation.

“If you’re going to trust anyone there, trust him,” Josh said firmly. For a fleeting moment, McCoy recalled why she had ever married him to start with. He was stabilizing, grounded even when she was prone to emotional frustration and temper. Just as easily, she remembered why they weren’t married anymore, but that wasn’t important just then. “Right? Either he owes you, or you’ve got to believe that he’s going to get you through another one of his whirlwind adventures.”

McCoy’s face softened more, and she sighed, rubbing her forehead and trying desperately to force a smile onto her face. “No problem,” she said quietly, and then looked up at him. Clara was standing next to the desk again, her hand on Josh’s shoulder. “Thanks, Josh,” she said and checked her chronometer before she addressed Clara directly. “Has Joanna got any time before she needs to go to bed?”

Clara hesitated, and then she nodded once. It was no secret that the woman hated McCoy, and while McCoy didn’t like her all that much, either, she could hardly hold that dislike against the woman. “She’s drying off now,” she said instead. “I’ll go get her.”

“Thanks,” McCoy said gruffly and sat back in her chair while Josh and Clara left the room together. She stared after them and tried to consider Josh’s words. He was probably right, after all. She had been distracted, disconnected from Kirk and the rest of her life deep in the Federation, _home_ , and had forgotten that it was the only thing that mattered now. The nagging idea that things with Kirk weren’t right came back to her strongly, and she thought of their disagreement in the meeting earlier in the evening. If McCoy needed an ally, then Kirk was a tried and true one.

*

Spock had identified that most of the early infections had occurred in the settlement near the landing position they had chosen accordingly. They were isolated from the nearest community, which the previous team had already combed through on the last mission, but the team still seemed tense when they rematerialized on hard ground. Spock had also provided the necessary equipment to the team, though McCoy had chosen to take only her own tricorder to observe the landscape. It was dry here; untended, wild land that lay beyond the reach of the colonists. McCoy had always thought it looked somewhat like Earth from afar, but it could not have been more different to her eyes when her boots crunched across rough soil, the occasional plant like dried spokes from the ground.

“Fan out,” Kirk ordered. McCoy rolled her eyes irritably. He was perfectly at right to give orders, she knew, but there was something in the expression he leveled on her before turning away that reminded her of the tension in the meeting on the Starbase, and she didn’t like it. McCoy sighed and shoved her tricorder down into its pouch on her hip, jogging after him.

“Jim,” she called, and he even paused to allow her to catch up. “We might as well go together,” she suggested. He stared at her the same way as before, and she thought of Josh’s advice. If she was going to trust anyone, it had to be him, even if he was feeling unjustifiably betrayed by her.

Finally, he nodded and his face broke into a smile, even if it was only a muted smile that looked out of place and faded quickly.

“I know you don’t like this,” she said to him as they walked. His eyes were glued to his equipment, but he looked up at her when she broke their silence. “And you’re not used to someone disobeying.”

“You’re not under my chain of command,” he said stiffly, sounding more as though he was reminding himself of that.

“Drop the shit, Jim,” she scolded and adjusted a few settings on the tricorder. “We need to trust each other, right? We’ve got the same general goal here. Save lives, save the Federation, keep the peace, right?”

“Hey, no problems here,” he said in a casual tone that didn’t convince McCoy for a minute. She was determined not to let him get to her when they were working. Any problems with Kirk’s bruised ego could be dealt with afterward.

They had been searching for well over two hours with little more to say aside from perfunctory conversations about scanner readings when Kirk’s communicator chirped at him and Chekov’s voice came across clearly.

“Captain,” he said urgently and McCoy immediately exchanged a look with Kirk.

“Go ahead, Ensign,” he instructed. McCoy could see him swallow and she did the same. Her mouth felt dry.

“We may have found something in the water supply.” Mendelson’s voice was unmistakable, quieter than Chekov’s and less confident about the news he was bringing to them.

“Describe it, Mendelson,” McCoy barked before Kirk could say anything. His eyes were glued to the communicator, away from McCoy’s gaze.

“A small mechanical sphere, Doctor,” Mendelson answered. Soft shifting could be heard on the other end of the communicator, soft, indistinguishable conversation between Chekov and Mendelson, then he continued. “Four inches diameter, made from an unidentified alloy, about half a kilogram in weight.”

“I—we think this might be significant,” Chekov interrupted when Mendelson paused in his description. “Captain, Doctor, I believe you should come here. I have transferred our exact coordinates to you.”

“So you did,” Kirk answered, looking down at his tricorder. “Hang tight. We’ll be there soon. Contact the rest of the landing party.”

McCoy walked toward Kirk and the communicator and spoke directly to it. “Mendelson, be careful with that thing.”

“Acknowledged.” Mendelson’s voice quavered, and she sighed. The poor kid didn’t ask to be on a mission like this, didn’t ask for this kind of danger when he joined Starfleet Medical. Like much of her staff, they had joined for the opportunity to conduct important medical research, not to be a soldier of Starfleet. McCoy was beginning to think that such motivations were naive, even if she had joined for nearly identical reasons.

“See you soon, gentlemen. Kirk out.” Kirk closed the communicator and finally looked McCoy in the face. “Let’s get over there, Bones.”

McCoy nodded curtly and followed as they first retraced their steps their steps to the landing site and then followed Chekov and Mendelson’s path toward the colony’s reservoir. The two of them were standing by the edge of the water near an irrigation pipe for the fields.

When they reached them, Kirk reached out for the small device and took it from Chekov. After examining it for a moment, turning the small thing around in his palm, he looked up at them. “I think you’re right,” he said to her and Mendelson when they stepped to the side, and turned it around in his hand. When McCoy reached out for it, he looked down at her for a moment and held it tighter for a brief, passing second before handing it over to her.

It was heavy, and near the top, McCoy could see the mechanism that she thought might have released the pathogen into the water supply. Her forehead wrinkled, and Kirk leaned closer to her, out of earshot of everyone else.

“I guess you were right, too,” he conceded, resting his hand on her shoulder. “Does this look like it might be it, Bones?”

“I think so,” she said back to him and looked up. His eyebrows were pushed together curiously and he was staring at the device like it would reveal all its secrets to him if he did so for long enough. “Spock is going to want to look at it, too. I can do some tests, but—”

Kirk shook his head and released her shoulder, but stopped when his eyes met hers. “On the ship,” he clarified. The rest of his words were unspoken, but McCoy understood as clearly as she had when they had been in the Academy, easily capable of communicating by a meaningful glance. Kirk had once trusted no one but her, but that no longer quite seemed the case. Still, she intended to pursue the subject further later, in lone confidence.

She pulled away and retreated some distance from the group before she flipped open her communicator and stared as it connected with Grax on the station. There was a pause as the connection was established, and Grax’s face appeared on the miniature screen.

“Commander,” she said quietly, holding the orb in her hand tightly. “Mendelson and Chekov found a mechanical object in a reservoir near the settlement that may be related to our outbreak.”

“Bring it back to the base,” Grax instructed in a quiet voice. “I want the tests to be done by our laboratories under your supervision, McCoy.”

McCoy considered arguing with her, telling her that they needed to cooperate the crew of the _Enterprise_ , but she held her tongue. It was too late, though. Grax’s expression shifted, and she looked at her with concern.

“Remember what I warned you about, McCoy,” she said firmly, with the air of someone who was forced to show reality to someone unwilling to see it. “Remain vigilant. The _Enterprise_ is here to assist us, whatever the motivations of her captain.” Or the admiral who had sent them, who Kirk had still not identified, McCoy thought, perhaps uncharitably.

Kirk needed her trust. Grax needed her loyalty. She needed both from each of them if she had any hope of accomplishing her goal. “This will help us isolate a vaccine and search for a cure for those already infected,” she asserted aloud.

“Move quickly, then,” Grax ordered, and then her expression softened from pity and hardened coldness to something that McCoy might have even interpreted as reassurance. “McCoy, if there is any doctor in the Federation who could accomplish this, it is you. And whoever is responsible for the infection certainly never accounted for your presence.”

“We’ll return immediately, Commander,” she said, rather than acknowledge the compliment. Whether it was true or not, McCoy felt uneasy as Kirk requested beam up for the landing party. The evidence of a conspiracy was in her hands at that moment, and whether or not the party responsible for planting it had known that Doctor Lenore McCoy was aboard Starbase 84 when they had done so, they certainly, doubtlessly, knew then.

*

Work moved rapidly with the added sense of urgency from the discovery of the sphere. Grax had consented to allow Spock to work alongside McCoy in the station laboratories, though Kirk had fought the idea initially, insisting that the _Enterprise_ had superior facilities. It was three days of solid work without much rest and all her meals taken her office before McCoy finally managed to accomplish something worth mention with the amount of organic residue remaining inside the sphere.

It had been a time-release creation, designed to allow its carrier to make a quick exit without danger of fully exposing themselves to the pathogen. And while the samples she had collected from the sphere were older, less-adapted ancestors of the same pathogen rampant on the planet, they were ideal for developing a vaccine when synthesized from the data she had gathered before.

McCoy had arranged the meeting between Spock, Grax and herself, and Grax had offered her ready room for the occasion. When McCoy arrived, she found that both were waiting patiently for her, ignoring identical cups of steaming tea in front of them. McCoy set down her PADD and nodded to both of them before she sat down at the smaller table reserved for such meetings.

“Doctor McCoy,” Spock greeted and pushed his PADD to the center of the table. “Now that you have arrived, I trust we will be able to proceed with our discussion as planned?”

“Go right ahead, Spock,” she sighed and rested her back in the soft chair. He nodded curtly to both her and Commander Grax, and then proceeded to begin a pre-programmed holographic display of the infection source from the planet.

“As we know, this device was discovered in the reservoir of the Galf colony on the planet we are orbiting. Doctor McCoy has extracted adequate samples from this device and has developed a vaccine still in its infancy that will require further testing before deployment. I have conducted my own tests on the device and have discovered a great deal about its design, construction and origin.”

Grax stared at Spock intently, plainly encouraging him to continue. McCoy cleared her throat.

“Have you discovered enough to tell us anything conclusive about those things?” Her voice was harsher than she had intended, but if McCoy had ever learned anything about Spock, it was that she had a difficult time truly antagonizing him, however she tried.

Spock tapped a brief command into his PADD and the hologram began to move, animating the projection of the device and displaying each of its inner parts, broken apart and on display from all angles.

“The design is as you concluded, Doctor. It is a single-purpose, single-use containment device programmed to release its contents on a timer. In this case, the pathogen that led to the outbreak of Saunaed Sidemen on the planet.” Spock paused, for what McCoy could only assume was dramatic effect. Then he continued after meeting their eyes around the table, perhaps only to be sure that they were following his presentation.

“What is disturbing about the device is that it is not, as Captain Kirk has posited, of Romulan origin.” McCoy looked across the table to see Grax’s face, but she hid her reaction well. Spock continued as if he was unaware of their exchange. “I have checked the materials, the style used to program the device, and ten other differentiating variables that might have indicated Romulan production, but if it is meant to deceive the one who discovered it, then it is a poor attempt.”

McCoy thought that maybe Spock’s idea of a poor attempt would have fooled just about anyone else, but she kept quiet and let the briefing continue.

“What is the origin of the device, then, Commander Spock?” When Grax finally spoke, she hardly sounded pleased that her assertions had been proven correct. “This does not resemble any Klingon technology I have ever seen.”

“And it should not,” Spock told them crisply. “This is entirely of Federation origin. All tested variables concluded well within the acceptable margin of error that this was assuredly produced by the Federation.”

McCoy’s eyebrows wrinkled immediately with skepticism. “From the Federation,” she echoed. “The same Federation we’re working for? The one that maintains Starfleet. The Federation that planted the colonists dying of Saunaed Sidemen down there while we fight about where it came from?”

“The same, Doctor.” Spock shut off his hologram immediately and looked between the two of them. “We cannot conclude by this information whether or not this is the work of officials, an internal dissident group, or a rogue.”

“Given the recent murders aboard our base,” Grax said and shook her head. “I cannot say that I think this is some lone, maddened rogue.”

“I think I’m inclined to agree,” McCoy said, arching her eyebrows high into her hairline. “But how do we decide who else might be responsible for something like this?”

“Who else might wish to instigate chaos and anarchy?” Grax mused with something of a wry expression, and Spock shook his head.

“I am not certain we can conclusively say. It will require further exploration of the subject, but we may safely report to Starfleet Command that this is not an incident with the Romulans.” His slim, pale fingers were quick with the PADD. “Doctor, I have appreciated the space to work in your laboratory. If you will allow it, I will continue my work there, as Commander Grax suggested before you arrived that she would be more comfortable if the device stayed under the protection of the security team here.”

“That’s fine,” she said and clutched her PADD. “I’m planning to begin trials for the vaccine this afternoon and begin production within the next two days. I’ve received the most recent reports from the planet, including news of a new mutation in Galf.”

“Then I will return to my duties as well,” Spock offered as the three rose in unison. When he had bid both of them a good day, McCoy rubbed her forehead and stared after him.

“I am very grateful that Commander Spock has been so helpful,” Grax said from behind McCoy, who thought that might have been a dig against Kirk that she didn’t rise to. “You’ve done very well, McCoy,” she continued and approached her desk, staring for a long time out the window without saying anything more than that until McCoy turned to the door, and she stopped her by clearing her throat.

“I hesitate to cast blame, but Commander Spock’s briefing may have given us reason to begin investigating Starfleet personnel and other visitors to the station.” Grax turned to look at McCoy, her eyes sweeping up and down her frame in a way that made McCoy feel self-conscious. She wondered if Grax was reading her, when she realized suddenly that for three years she had worn her emotions on her sleeve and Grax had never needed her natural empathic abilities to be attuned to them.

“Have you felt anything among the crew?” McCoy blurted out without thinking, and then there was no way to recall the indelicate words about Grax’s telepathy.

Grax only smiled and paced along the window. “No, McCoy, don’t feel sorry for saying that. I don’t make it a habit of probing the minds of my subordinates—or my superiors, for that matter. I learned very long ago when I left Betazed that it isn’t polite to intrude into the privacy of those who cannot reach back into my own.” Her face was soft and McCoy felt herself relax, as if she had been wrapped in a warm blanket. Grax was trying very hard to be comforting for her sake, as if she had always known that McCoy had been uncomfortable by the lacking opacity of her own emotion. “But sometimes emotions leak through, especially in those who feel things very strongly. Sometimes I cannot help it. And still, I have felt nothing here.”

“That worries me,” McCoy realized aloud, and this time didn’t feel too embarrassed by it.

“And me,” Grax affirmed. “I would not rely on telepathic abilities to help us in this. Commander Spock could mind-meld with a suspect, I could force my way in just as well, but it would be a gross violation of privacy, both on the part of a suspect, and of our own. And we do not have time probe the minds of everyone who may have set foot on this station in the last six months.”

McCoy nodded solemnly and ran her fingertips along the side of her PADD. “Thank you, Commander. I should... I should be on my way.”

They both paused and McCoy realized they were both waiting for something to happen. Fortunately, Grax spoke again.

“I’ve been here a long time, McCoy,” she said and smiled at her. “And I understand what it’s like to think of home often when you feel very far away from all you care about.”

“I do as I’m told, Commander,” she said stiffly. Grax’s choice of words was uncomfortably close to her thoughts recently, even her recent conversation with Josh. “Even if it means I’m here instead of there.”

“I know,” Grax sighed, and then continued warmly, in a way that suggested what she was going to say wasn’t meant to be an insult. “People like you need things to bring them to action, McCoy. So don’t forget those things you miss when you’re here, if it gives you something to hold onto.”

Grax then turned serenely back toward the window while McCoy stood frozen in place before mumbling some farewell and walking out of the room and into the hall.

*

It was past 2200 when the chime on McCoy’s door went off. She had only just returned to her quarters in the past half-hour and had been busying herself with a number of personal messages that she had left languishing, one from her mother included.

“Come in,” she called and stood up. McCoy was still straightening her uniform when the door opened and Kirk entered with a somewhat serious expression. “Jim,” she sighed in greeting and waved him deeper into the room. Spock must have finished briefing him on the earlier meeting, his findings, and the conclusions that were yet to be drawn.

“I talked to Spock,” Kirk said, confirming her suspicions, and then he sat in the chair closest to her window. His face was dark and troubled, and he couldn’t quite lift his eyes and hold her stare for more than a few seconds. “He told me about what he found.”

“And?” McCoy followed him and leaned against the wall near the window so she could face him. “This is already above my head, Jim. It has been since the beginning, since before I knew it was too big for me. I’m a doctor, not a diplomat, not an intelligence officer. Just a doctor.”

“I know you are, Bones.”

McCoy closed her eyes to contain her mounting frustration and sat down in the chair opposite of Kirk’s. She covered her face with her hands and rubbed her eyes until she saw stars behind her eyelids. “Then what am I going to do about it? I don’t even know what I’m dealing with here.”

“Just do your job,” Kirk suggested with weary irritation. He was taking the revelation that the Romulans weren’t involved, that something far more sinister was at work, much harder than McCoy had expected him to. “Let me take care of this kind of thing, okay? That’s what I’m here for. You do your job and I’ll do mine.”

“You can’t fix everything, Jim,” she said and rested her elbows on her knees, folding her hands in front of her. “Neither can I.”

The depressed tone of his voice vanished with his shy avoidance of her stare, leaving only hot irritability. “You’re a doctor, Bones, like you said. But I _am_ a diplomat, I _am_ —” Kirk cut himself short and took a shaky breath. “I _am_ supposed to fix everything in this case. That’s why I’ve got the extra stripes.”

McCoy clenched her jaw and nodded once. It was just short of a direct order and she found that she resented it a great deal more than she had expected to. A visit like this was supposed to be different. She had missed him and was beginning to think that Kirk was different enough from the man she’d met, become friends with, that they were irreversibly growing apart. “Fine,” she bit out. “Is that all you came for?”

Her expression was more revealing than she had intended, McCoy realized when Kirk’s face changed quickly from anger to regret and finally rested on a familiar apologetic expression.

“Not really,” he admitted and sat back. “We’ve both been under a lot of pressure since I got here, and I _was_ looking forward to seeing you again.”

“It was easier when we were in different divisions that never crossed much,” McCoy said, conceding with a sigh. “Starfleet Medical is a lot different than Command.”

“I know,” Kirk grinned a little, pushing his hair up with his hand. “Efficient, no frills, no politics.”

Her mouth twisted between a frown and a smile. “You enjoy this.”

“Ah,” Kirk corrected, “I used to enjoy it. It’s different after commissioning. Turns out, the real thing isn’t really like the Kobayashi Maru—there’s always a way to win, for one.”

His eyes glossed over, as if he was thinking about something distant, far off from the other side of her window. Then he sharpened again just as suddenly, and his face reflected some bitterness about life that was different than the kind that had left him an angry delinquent in Iowa. Even then, from the moment McCoy had met him, she had always thought that he was bright, shining and untouchable; reaching for stars that were attainable, at least for Jim Kirk. Now that he was among them, though, she thought he looked duller, tarnished by his own ambition.

“So, it’s just the way you always thought it should be,” McCoy said to shatter the sudden silence. “You don’t believe in no-win scenarios.”

“Sometimes the winning strategy doesn’t feel like the right one,” he sighed and stood up before adding cryptically, “And then it’s not worth winning.”

“Jim...” McCoy followed him to the door wordlessly, unable to think of anything more to say. What _had_ Kirk been through that made him feel unsatisfied, even guilty?

“Hey, forget about it,” he insisted with his disarming smile and pressed the release on the door. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Get some sleep tonight, right?”

“Right,” she agreed and stood in the doorway. Kirk’s communicator chirped at him and he reached for it.

“Kirk here,” he answered formally, dropping the familiar tones he used with McCoy for the serious, captain’s tone she’d heard him use with the rest of his crew.

“Captain,” Chekov’s voice was clear but tight on the other end. Kirk exchanged a look with McCoy that was nothing less than alarm. “You should come to the station commander’s office immediately.”

Kirk didn’t move, didn’t answer, not at first. Then he beckoned for McCoy to follow and started walking quickly toward the turbolift. “What’s going on, Ensign?”

Chekov didn’t answer immediately and McCoy recognized the sound of his boots echoing in Grax’s office. What was he doing in the commander’s office, and what was it that had to be done so late in the night? A tight swoop and clench in her stomach heralded a surge of adrenaline that left her light-headed and her limbs heavy while she staggered onto the lift with Kirk.

Finally, his voice came again, louder than the footsteps and sudden enough to make McCoy jump a little. “Commander Grax has been murdered,” he said quietly. “Captain, are you—”

“Doctor McCoy is with me,” Kirk interrupted as McCoy commanded the lift to take them to the operations area of the station. The lift demanded her security access code, to her surprise, and she gave her code, and then her medical override. “We’re on our way.”

McCoy felt cold, her face drained of blood, and she realized her whole body, not only her hands, were shaking violently. “Jim,” she began, and didn’t finish her thought, the utter disbelief. It simply couldn’t have been true.

“I know,” he said and stepped off the lift ahead of her, marching straight toward Grax’s office.

The doors opened for them immediately, and Chekov stood straighter, several meters closer to the door than the desk. Just beyond it, McCoy saw Grax, her dark hair splashed across her tan skin and on the floor around her head. She was immediately across the office without realizing it, kneeling next to her commander and checking her pulse, seeking any sign of life at all with all the stable professionalism she could force herself to project.

“Bones?” Kirk’s voice broke her concentration and McCoy snapped her head up toward him. He crouched on the other side of the body and pushed Grax’s hair away, then made a stifled noise and pulled his hands, now streaked in blood, away from the sodden clump of strands.

McCoy lifted Grax’s head gingerly and examined her bloody skull. The wound there was obviously from a blunt object, swung down onto Grax’s head, as if she hadn’t quite seen it coming. McCoy closed her eyes to steady her rolling stomach and lowered Grax back to the ground. What could have prevented Grax from foreseeing her attack, either by sensing the intentions of her murderer or just common sense, as she was so prone to?

“She’s dead,” McCoy confirmed and leaned back on her heels, then pushed up to stand. “Get me a team up here to prepare the body for transport to the laboratory. Set up a clean room, no contamination at all. We’ve already screwed up the scene in here, we might as well not make it worse.” Her voice sounded alien and far-off to herself, as if she was watching the whole scene from somewhere very far away rather than controlling it. “I want a full security detail guarding the laboratory. _No one_ goes in there but me until I’ve finished an autopsy.”

Kirk looked surprised at first, but not mutinous, even as they realized together that she had just mistakenly given him an order. He rose up to his feet again and turned toward the security back-up that Chekov had plainly called after the captain. “You heard her.”

“Why in hell didn’t you call a medical team first?” McCoy demanded, wheeling on Chekov and giving in to the sudden burst of anger that came clearly through her shock.

Chekov looked alarmed, unprepared for her, and his shoulders slumped a little before he explained. “I was on security patrol tonight. I saw something through the doors and used the security override when Commander Grax didn’t answer.”

“That doesn’t explain why you didn’t call me the _minute_ you saw there was a medical emergency,” McCoy continued vehemently.

“With all due respect, Doctor, the commander was already dead when I entered her office,” Chekov said. Though he looked every bit as young as McCoy knew he was, she realized that Kirk wasn’t the only one who had seen something to change him from who he’d been before. Chekov was as confident and cocky as ever, but shadowed at the edges.

“Lay off, Bones,” Kirk said and grabbed her shoulder.

In the doorway, Spock appeared, watching the scene unfold. McCoy felt unusually naked, and she wanted to shield Grax’s body, to prevent anyone else from seeing what had happened until she could make sense of it. Kirk took him outside to talk quickly, and McCoy watched as the medical team arrived and transported Grax’s body out as she’d ordered. None of it felt real and McCoy could no more comprehend what had already just happened than what action she would need to take next.

“I believe you were second-in-command to Commander Grax on the station, Doctor McCoy?” Spock’s voice sounded unnaturally calm when it came from nowhere, ringing in McCoy’s ears until she looked up at him and realized what he was saying.

“I’m not—” she began, but between Spock’s expectant stare and Kirk’s astonished one, McCoy knew it was too late, Spock was right. “I was,” she said, and stared with horror at Kirk, then Chekov, Spock, and then the group of officers crowding toward the office, drawn in by hushed whispers and rumors spreading like wildfire.

Spock inclined his head to her and stepped inside the office, releasing the door behind him so it would close and lock, isolating the four of them—Kirk, McCoy, Spock, and Chekov—in Grax’s office.

“We are dealing with something far more serious than we had expected,” Spock began.

McCoy recovered herself in time to stop him with a lifted hand, long before Kirk could. “And we’ll address it very soon,” she said and looked at the chronometer on Grax’s desk. “It’s late tonight. I’ll have the autopsy reports for you first thing in the morning.”

Kirk looked mutinous, but seemed to think twice about challenging her when Spock nodded to her. “Try and...” If he was going to suggest that she sleep, then McCoy was glad that he chose otherwise. “We’ll see you in the morning, Bones,” he finished instead, and exchanged a look with her, then the other two as they slipped out and left her there, alone and staring after their backs long after the door had closed again behind them.

*

The rest of the night after the discovery of Grax’s body had gone like a flash, and the morning after dragged along just as slowly. McCoy hadn’t slept after the autopsy had finished. She had instead retreated to her laboratory to continue running the vaccine through its theoretical trials. It was work she could easily pour herself into, reminding herself constantly that she had patients, victims of the epidemic on the planet who were relying on her to keep moving forward. Grax had insisted all along that McCoy stay focused, but it was only when the commander had been removed that McCoy found it suddenly easy to focus solely on her work and ignore the rest of the goings-on aboard the base. She would have to take on the many administrative tasks that accompanied the everyday maintenance and function of a full station, but McCoy could only make a note to herself to talk to one of the administrative officers who had dealt with those things for Grax and confirm that things were moving forward at a reasonably adjusted rate, given the amount of rare activity aboard the base.

Mendelson hovered nervously in the laboratory, checking one of the models on another console, though his work was slower than McCoy was used to. The whole base was shaken, McCoy included, except it was now her responsibility and hers alone to put the entire mess back together again and continue with things as before. It was right, it was what they needed. Most of all, it was what she needed to hold together.

McCoy had just sat back in her chair and rubbed her eyes after adding a few changes to the make-up of the vaccine stored in her computer when she heard the doors behind her swish open. McCoy turned her chair toward the door. Kirk strode across the laboratory purposefully, and she rose to her feet immediately and directed him into her office.

She hadn’t seen him since they had been together in Grax’s office. McCoy had been too busy since then, and Kirk had been working with the investigative team examining the scene in the office. McCoy had avoided the office even though she knew she would have to go there soon. All the system controls on the station were routed to the commander’s office and she would be forced to go there to fulfill her new responsibilities. Besides that, McCoy had a sunken feeling that some of the answers to her questions about the nature of Grax’s murder and its connection to her vaccine would only be answered there.

Kirk allowed himself to be diverted, but as soon as the door was closed behind them, before McCoy even had the opportunity to seal the lock, he turned on her. “You’ve finished the vaccine.”

“I’ve developed a vaccine, I haven’t finished it,” she corrected. He was tense and it put her on edge. Kirk was rarely tense about anything, except lately. “Where have you been?”

“Well, you’ve finished with that source,” he said impatiently without answering. “The laboratories on the _Enterprise_ need to analyze it just as much as you do.”

McCoy recoiled, but she didn’t take a step back. Instead, she stepped forward and lifted her jaw stubbornly. “Commander Grax is dead, and you’re worried about conducting lab tests? The point of doing any of this is to save the colonists dying of this, to save anyone else from dying from this, especially if that means there’s a conspiracy on this station.”

“No,” Kirk interrupted before she could finish her sentence, plainly irritated. “The point is to deal with this situation and make sure justice is served to the right people.”

Her face changed quickly from surprise to anger. “That’s a goddamn lie and we both know it. You aren’t interested in justice for the right people any more than Starfleet is going to be when they find out that someone in the Federation is murdering people.” McCoy paused to take a breath and continue, but the dark, guarded expression on Kirk’s face tipped something inside her, forced something to click into place.

“What aren’t you telling me, Jim?” she demanded, lowering her voice immediately. “What is it that you don’t want me to know? Because I’ve got a few thousand people relying on this vaccine and whatever other information I can get out of that little ball in there to stop this in its tracks before it gets onto your ship, or this base, or anywhere else in the Federation.” McCoy took a long breath and stared at him more intently. “So tell me what it is that you’re trying to hide, because I don’t have the goddamn time to play mind games with you while you’re fooling around.”

Kirk was, for the first time since McCoy had met him, completely silent. Her breath was ragged despite her attempt to calm down again, but for all the effort she had put forth in trying to trust him, in accepting what he did on faith, she had no more patience for his cryptic hints and brooding attitudes.

“Ask me questions, then,” he said. “I’ll answer anything you ask, Bones.”

She sank into her desk chair and pressed her knuckles into her eyes. The last conversation she had with Spock and Grax only hours before the commander’s murder flickered back to mind. The orb out in her laboratory was of Federation technology, not Romulan. McCoy remembered with a sinking sensation in her stomach that Kirk knew that already, and not because he might have spoken to Spock. For someone who had been so insistent of Romulan involvement, he hadn’t been very surprised when his theory was disproven. “You’re not here to assist, are you? You can’t have been; you’ve been the opposite of helpful.”

Kirk held his tongue for a moment, and then he sighed. When he sat in the chair opposite of her desk, he looked resigned, exhausted, more honestly himself than he’d allowed himself to be around McCoy since he arrived. “If I tell you a story, you’re going to have to believe every word of it. Okay, Bones?”

“Tell me why I have to believe it first,” she groaned, but her irritation was only a mask for the growing void in her stomach that was rapidly eating away at her. She had been right all along, something _was_ wrong with Kirk; something more than lack of sleep, too much pressure from the _Enterprise_ , or even with age.

“I’m serious. What I’m going to tell you could get you killed, Bones, if you don’t trust me completely from now on.” He looked up at her and she saw him swallow visibly, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat.

“Spit it out, then,” she said firmly, and hoped her voice didn’t waver noticeably. “I wasn’t kidding when I said I didn’t have the time to waste like this.”

Kirk ignored her and began, “How familiar are you with the Starfleet Charter?” When she opened her mouth to answer, Kirk shook his head and continued without allowing her to stop him, though his voice was shaking the way McCoy’s had been a moment before. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll tell you. Article 14, Section 31 states that Starfleet officers are permitted to act outside regulations in times of extraordinary threats. In my second year in the Academy, Admiral Komack approached me with a proposition to join a group of elite officers. He told me that this group, what he called Section 31, has a long history of making history from behind the scenes, influencing policies, acting in the interest of the Federation when official ways were blocked.”

Kirk turned his face to meet hers with a wry smile and he shook his head. “It doesn’t matter what he told me. What matters is that I thought it was my style—and it was. It is. Breaking the rules and getting what needed to be done faster, better than anyone else could do it. There’s a… a small initiation, and then you go about your career in the fleet. I’d nearly forgotten until he sent me that coded message a couple of weeks ago when I was negotiating with the Halkans.”

“And he told you about the outbreak here? No.” McCoy’s mind was already racing past possibilities. If he had been sent to assist, as he had suggestion, then there was no need to bring up his checkered past with secret societies and strange initiations. Instead, he had blocked her work at every chance he had, distracting her at times and fighting her at others, knowing all along as he insisted that the Romulans were involved that Federation technology had created the pathogen and the mechanism that had allowed it to infect the population of the planet below.

“No,” Kirk confirmed gravely, holding eye-contact with her. “You know.”

She did know. She stood up abruptly as she realized aloud, speaking the words absently as they came to her: “They planted it here. This—this Section whatever it is. They did it because…” Her thoughts ended there, and she looked up expectantly at Kirk. “Why?”

“The treaty with the Romulans,” Kirk explained and stood up as McCoy advanced toward him. “It was determined to be an extraordinary threat after what happened to Vulcan. And the _Kelvin_ —people are still uptight about that, even now.”

McCoy sputtered with rage, incapable of forming words at first, and then she shook her head violently. “We both know—everyone knows that Nero had not a goddamn thing to do with the Romulan Empire.”

“Not everyone, Bones,” Kirk corrected. “We know, because we were there, but the sentiment in the rest of the Federation, especially the surviving Vulcans and a lot of Humans, is that Nero was Romulan—as Romulan as the rest of the ones on the other side of the Neutral Zone. Forming a treaty with them with the amount of public discontent might have actually seemed like an extraordinary threat to peace and security in the Federation.”

“And _war_ is a better option?” McCoy demanded so fiercely that Kirk took a step back from her and steadied himself on his chair. “We’ve spent the last three years at this forsaken starbase trying to make peace with them after the Federation has been suspicious of them and every other race in the galaxy for the last twenty years. What the hell has that been for?”

McCoy thought of Joanna at home, the pair of patients who had died in her laboratory, even Commander Grax and her skepticism. She had been right all along, and McCoy had missed her subtle suggestions. They all fell into place now.

“Did you murder my patients? Or Commander Grax?” she asked quietly, though she knew already that the answer was no. Kirk hadn’t accessed the laboratory the night before or even the morning of their deaths, hadn’t had the clearance to do so, anyway. McCoy also somehow knew that he wouldn’t have been capable of murdering Grax in cold blood. It was wrong, it wasn’t in his nature, no matter how deeply he might have betrayed her.

“No,” he answered flatly. To his credit, he didn’t even look hurt that she had asked. McCoy took another breath and moved to her next question, the last one she could think of.

“Do you or don’t you agree with these—with this plan?” she asked him in the calmest, lowest voice she could manage. “And if you don’t, then tell me why you went along with it.”

“I don’t have any good answers for you,” Kirk explained, spreading his hands peacefully. “I still want—I need to get to the bottom of all of this. If you haven’t realized, Bones, I’m not the only one that Section 31 dispatched to Starbase 84. I wasn’t here to start the outbreak, I didn’t murder anyone, which means someone was here, and still is here, and they’re a much greater danger to either of us.”

McCoy’s stomach plummeted again, and she closed her hand into a fist at her side. “You don’t know who it is? How can you not know who you’re working with?”

“This isn’t really a networking organization,” Kirk told her and shook his head. “I don’t know, and we need to find out. We can’t rule out the possibility that someone dropped that fancy dispenser on the planet some time ago from a starship that came through here, and that someone else is running amok on the base.”

“Or that someone’s been here all along,” she reminded him, thinking of all the people she knew on the base. There were hundreds, thousands of Starfleet officers, potential recruits for Section 31, and she had no way of knowing which of them might have been involved. “We have to contact Starfleet Command,” she announced and turned toward her console again, pacing back and forth before she settled on a course, opening her message screen.

“Wait, what?” Kirk followed after her and pushed her hands away from the keypad. “We don’t know who’s listening to our conversations here, we don’t know who is involved in Section 31 in the upper brass, and we certainly don’t know what people think in their own heads back on Earth. We can’t just walk straight into it without thinking about it, not if we’re going to—to do anything about this.” Kirk’s speech finished weakly, and he gripped her hand in his own.

“It’s almost like you listen to me sometimes, Jim,” McCoy scowled, and was met with a stony look from him. “There has to be someone we can contact. There’s a murderer running amok around here somewhere and they’re backed by an organization that I’m mostly sure is illegal, and soon they’re going to be responsible for the deaths of several hundred Federation colonists.”

“Not completely illegal,” he said wryly and squeezed her hand. “And we can handle this ourselves.” McCoy pulled her hand away, only for Kirk to grab it back. “I don’t know how far up this goes, Bones, and you didn’t even know about most of this until now. We have to do this together, or we’re not going to make it through this at all.”

“Okay,” she said and took a deep breath to center her thoughts. “Who can we rule out here? You and me.”

“Spock,” Kirk said with a soft snort. “There’s no way. Not even now, especially not now. He’s spent too much time around—you know, the other Spock—to have come out vengeful and murderous. I need him focusing on the crew on the _Enterprise_ right now, though. You and I get to handle this alone, Bones.”

McCoy looked down at the console, and then shut off the screen. “Fine. We do it your way. And if it doesn’t work, then we go back to Command and we start finding whoever is the _least_ corrupted and we take this whole, rotten plan down.”

“That’s what I hoped I’d hear,” Kirk said sincerely, the beginning of a grin on the very edge of his mouth. For the first time since Kirk had arrived, McCoy felt fully confident that the air had been cleared between them, and there was nothing else preventing them from moving forward.

“Don’t look smug,” she warned and looked out at the laboratory. “We have two problems, and neither is going to get solved without taking care of the other.”

“Saunaed Sidemen and our killer,” Kirk agreed, returning to solemnity. McCoy almost felt bad for crushing it out of him. It had almost been normal for only as long as she could forget how dire their situation was. “You take care of the first, Bones, and I’ve got your back while we get through the second.”

“Deal,” she sighed and walked toward the door with him. Just before she opened the door to let them out, she turned toward him and held out her hand for a truce. “Do you trust me?” she asked, and Jim gripped her arm and pulled her into an awkward half-hug.

“Yeah, Bones,” he laughed somewhere close to her ear before reaching behind her and releasing the lock on the door. “Yeah, I do.”

*

Despite her conversation with Kirk, McCoy found herself in the station commander’s office later that day, staring at a datapadd of reports she’d spent most of the day working on while trying to clear her head. She hadn’t been able to focus in her own office and had reluctantly left the remainder of testing under Gupta’s supervision in the labs. It was easy to second-guess herself, to see shadows of doubt instead of trustworthiness behind everyone on the station, but things needed to get done. To accomplish that, McCoy would need to put away that creeping doubt and focus.

After staring at the completed reports, checking them for any minute mistake, McCoy began to edit them. Kirk didn’t think she needed to submit them, but McCoy was certain if she didn’t at least record things as they had happened in some familiar form, then she wasn’t sure she could carry on with solving the problem that had been set at her feet. When she was done minutes later, she had transmitted an abridged version of them to Admiral Pike at Starfleet Headquarters and was left staring at a cup of coffee, the confirmation message on her datapadd, and little more. Grax was dead, McCoy was in command, investigations were underway to discover what exactly what was going on with the disease, stand by for further information as it arises. It wasn’t _entirely_ untruthful, just enough of a compromise to keep Kirk happy and to assuage McCoy’s guilt for keeping things under wraps.

They _couldn’t_ know who was supporting Section 31. There wasn’t even any reason for McCoy to believe Pike himself wasn’t involved, but paranoia was probably what Section 31 wanted from her. If she felt like she couldn’t trust anyone, then they’d be able to beat her, and McCoy couldn’t allow that to happen.

The desk console beeped and McCoy tapped the screen to reveal a notification from Command that they had received and were reviewing her report. Typical bureaucracy, but it would help McCoy for once while she worked over the massing evidence.

“Doctor McCoy,” the computer voice said evenly. “You have a personal message on subspace from Earth from Joanna Darnell.”

Normally, McCoy waited until she was back in her quarters to take personal messages from home, but this time she sat down in the chair behind the desk. “Onscreen,” she said and put on the most comforting smile she could manage for Joanna’s sake.

“Hi, Mommy,” Joanna said, all smiles and sunshine and utterly opposite to how McCoy was feeling.

“Hi there, darling,” she said and smiled at the screen. Behind Joanna, Josh was standing with his arms crossed and his expression focused. Even these visits had to be chaperoned, it wasn’t enough for the ones on Earth to be as well. McCoy didn’t feel the old resentment she’d felt for that. The emotion didn’t measure up to the others McCoy was feeling, and so she let the fight that might have been drop to the wayside in favor of simply talking to her daughter.

“Daddy says you’ve been busy lately. When are you coming home?” Joanna asked with a shy smile, like she might have convinced McCoy to abandon her work with that smile alone. If only it were that easy, she thought, and wondered what might happen if she did leave, resigned and went home, back to working in the hospital in their hometown, like she’d been doing before hopping on a transport to Riverside.

McCoy indulged in the fantasy for a moment, and smiled at the screen with her daughter’s image on it. As she did, McCoy imagined the political situation of the Federation accusing the Romulan government of the disease on the planet, of Grax’s murder. War would follow, and fighting close to Earth wouldn’t be too far behind. McCoy’s smile dimmed a little. Her place was here, on the edge of dead space, deep in the belly of the beast.

“Maybe soon, darling girl,” she deferred instead and tried to regain her composure for Joanna’s sake. “Tell me about school. I haven’t had the chance to talk to you like this in a little while.”

Joanna launched into an in-depth explanation of all the things going on in school, but McCoy found it increasingly difficult to focus on the details of things going on in Joanna’s life. When she caught herself drifting from the conversation once more, she snapped back to attention visibly and was met with a disapproving frown from Joanna.

“Is everything all right, Mommy?”

“Mommy’s probably very tired,” Josh began, walking toward the console. “Nora, if you’ve got other things to be doing—”

“No,” she insisted and shook her head. “No, I’m all right. I haven’t slept much, that’s all. Anyway, Joanna, you were saying about your teacher?”

Josh backed away from the screen again and sat in a chair off to the side, but not without exchanging another look with McCoy. Joanna continued undeterred and only stopped when Clara poked her head in to announce that dinner was ready.

“Oh,” she said when she saw McCoy again. Obviously, she felt that the sudden increase of her presence in the Darnell household was unwelcome, but McCoy was nothing if not used to Clara’s coldness. “Well, finish up soon, Joanna.”

“They’re nearly done, Clara,” Josh said and stood up, moving toward the screen while Joanna blew several dozen kisses at the screen for McCoy’s benefit.

“Daddy said you had a lot of very important things to do, like tests, and just keep doing your best, Mommy!” Joanna looked very pleased with her encouragement. McCoy thought she had probably been waiting for just the right moment to say it to her. “That’s what you tell me, isn’t it?”

“That’s right, honey,” McCoy sighed and blew her a weary kiss in return. Joanna looked pleased and waved goodbye before darting out of the room.

Josh watched her go, and only turned back toward McCoy when the door was closed behind her. “She was really excited about talking to you.” He paused and looked at her face, which had since fallen from the propped-up smile. “You look terrible.”

McCoy hesitated, and then shook her head. “It’s a long story, and most of it is still probably classified.”

“Remember our last conversation, then,” Josh sighed. “You better come back in one piece for your daughter’s sake.”

“I’ll do that,” she sighed and tapped her fingers on the desk restlessly. “Go eat dinner. I’ve got some more work to do tonight before I can turn in for the night.”

Josh’s mouth twisted without settling on the deep frown he was plainly considering. “All right. I’ll talk to you later.”

“Absolutely,” she sighed and waved a hand absently. “Computer, end transmission.” The screen went black immediately and McCoy felt a wash of loneliness that hit like a punch. She hadn’t been home for too long and everything felt much farther than it ever had when she knew she could talk to her friends, her parents, even her daughter in just moments over subspace. And yet, she still had a job that nothing could distract her from, not even the gnawing homesickness deep in her chest.

McCoy sighed and opened a comm link to Kirk. “Jim,” she said, bending over the console. A look at the chronometer told her that they had seen each other last only eight hours before, but time had recently taken on a stretched quality that made it feel like she hadn’t spoken to him in days.

“Bones.” Kirk’s voice rose in surprise and McCoy heard rustling, the sound of someone else with him. “I’m in Laboratory Alpha talking with some of your team. What’s going on?”

“I wanted to talk to you about your security reports,” she lied. That explained where he was, but not quite who he was with. Kirk was apparently keeping with the tone of their earlier discussion and proceeding with the investigation. “Some of the things in the ones you gave me this morning weren’t clear.”

There was a long pause from Kirk’s end while he must have been searching her words for some hidden code before deciding what it was she really meant. “Absolutely, Doctor. I’ll drop by a little later tonight when I finish these statements. Kirk out.”

McCoy hovered over the console one last time, considering what her next move should be, and then opened a connection with Spock and the _Enterprise_.

“Doctor,” he greeted with perfect calm. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

“Yeah,” she said and checked the laboratory computers that contained her research. “I’m going to transfer the research I’ve done on the vaccine, its makeup, and the treatment method I’ve developed to you on the _Enterprise._ Do you think you’ll be able to run some additional tests on it tonight? I want to deploy the vaccine on the planet as soon as I can.”

“Of course,” he said and looked down at his console, then gave her a short nod. “The data transfer was successful. I will use level eight security for the work here on the ship.”

“Commander,” McCoy interrupted before he could cut the link, thinking of the _Enterprise_ crew that she did know and thought she might trust. Then she took a deep breath, rubbed her forehead, and sighed until her lungs felt empty. “Have Chapel run the tests. I have another favor to ask of you.”

Spock looked hesitant, even mistrustful—he had come to some of his own conclusions about recent events and was as skeptical as McCoy was becoming—but then the expression passed within an instant. “Anything, Doctor.”

*

Kirk came to her quarters nearer to midnight than the time she had expected him, but McCoy had been plenty busy waiting for him in that time.

“You could have come earlier,” she scolded anyway and led him toward the table in the center of her quarters where she had spread several datapadds filled with information Spock had sent to her and that she had collected on her own.

“I thought someone might be watching after we had that conversation while I was in the laboratory,” Kirk offered in apology and sat down on one of her couches, grinning much too brightly for McCoy’s taste. “Rumor has it that you and I are a little more involved than a couple of old Academy buddies. You comming me like that earlier set the rumor mill to warp speed. I thought I’d help it along by coming here later than dictated by propriety.”

“Jim,” McCoy groaned, “that’s the opposite of helpful. We need to focus on—”

“On our investigation, I know,” Kirk interrupted and scooted closer to examine the datapadds she had assembled. “It’ll help us if the rumor gets around to our murderer that you and I are tangled up in other business, they might loosen up and get sloppy.”

“That’s a hell of a chance to take with our reputations,” McCoy said sharply, but sat down next to him. “Anyway, I talked to Spock earlier and had him run some searches in Starfleet databases for ships that have come in the last year, and how many of those have sent landing parties onto the planet, even just to that continent.”

“In case that sphere was planted by a crewman passing through.” Kirk’s face brightened. “You’re a genius, Bones. What did he find?”

“Well,” McCoy said and handed him a list of names. “Those are all the crewmen that went to the planet, and only a dozen or so of them have even set foot on that side of the planet. I checked the station’s records of those missions, since we facilitate most of their movements and we get in-depth reports about where they go, and none of them were within three hundred kilometers of that reservoir at any point in their missions.”

“Meaning that none of them could have planted it.” Kirk didn’t look too disappointed, as she had hoped. It would have been extremely inconvenient for them to try and track down any of a dozen suspects who could have been anywhere in the quadrant by that point.

“None of the station personnel who have been to the planet in that time have been transferred off, miraculously,” she continued and leaned over his arm to scroll to the next list. “These are all of them.”

“I see you’re on here,” Kirk said and looked up at her with his lips turned up in a smile. “Right, so this is them. Let’s see... A lot of these are environmental exploratory missions.”

“On the southernmost continent, right. There’s been talk of doing some kind of localized terraforming in that area for future colonization. I’ve marked the names that are relevant to us. That is, anyone who could have had the opportunity to make a drop like that.” McCoy sighed, set down another datapadd and rubbed her eyes wearily. “There are a lot that have been to the colony, though. We’ve made deliveries, collaborated with some of the scientists and doctors down there. We have regular contact with them. It could have happened at any time. That thing was programmed to go off on a timer, but that’s all we know. We can’t isolate a time when it might have been dropped in that reservoir, except that it was probably within the last nine months.”

“So we can’t pinpoint an exact time,” Kirk said dismissively and began adjusting the list she had compiled. “We have a time frame. Here, now we have a list of personnel we can place near the reservoir for the three month time frame we know it must have been planted in. What happened around then?”

McCoy picked up her own datapadd again and made similar adjustments to her list. “We just had a fresh bunch of graduates come on the station around seven months ago,” she noted and looked over the list. Gupta had come on around that time. So had another twelve research staff, at least, but McCoy stared at her name with a stab of doubt again.

“Computer,” she said aloud and stood from the couch, walking toward her console. “Retrieve personnel file. Padma Gupta, Lieutenant junior grade.”

“Bones?” Kirk set down his datapadd and walked toward the console with her. “Is there anything?”

“Just looking at her personnel file,” McCoy said, her brow furrowed tightly while she looked through her history. “Gupta’s very competent, she’s been to the planet with a lot of research groups because she was new, so she could learn her way around a research facility. And—look.” McCoy handed him her datapadd, where she had highlighted one particular mission. “She was unaccountable for about three hours during one of them, she could have...”

“Yeah,” Kirk said grimly and looked over the personnel record on McCoy’s console. “She doesn’t look the part. Says she failed shuttlecraft quals three times because she got spacesick. Not exactly good material for a spy.”

“Maybe that’s the point, so we don’t suspect,” McCoy countered darkly. “Look, I don’t want to believe it. I like her, I trusted her to work on some of the finer details of this investigation.”

Kirk frowned, and then sighed. “Okay. So we’ll consider her with the others.”

McCoy crossed her arms. “What if she’s not working alone?”

“Let’s assume they’re all guilty for right now,” Kirk said and closed the file for her, pacing around the table. “We don’t know if whoever is responsible is working alone. We don’t know if someone from the _Enterprise_ is involved, either.”

“What do you mean?” McCoy demanded, her face paling.

“I mean, things got much worse around here very shortly after I arrived. That means...” Kirk trailed off, implying the rest. McCoy sat down in one of her chairs hard.

“That means a lot of things. Don’t you trust your crew?”

“As much as you trust the crew here,” he smiled. “We don’t know who it could be, with only a few exceptions. We have to suspect everyone who could reasonably be involved.”

McCoy wilted visibly, lowering her head down into her hands, and tried to think of anything peculiar. Suddenly, she recalled the series of conversations with Sulu, her strange, cryptic warnings that had come before Kirk had even voiced his suspicions.

“Sulu,” she said and looked up. “Sulu cornered me a couple of times to—she brought up the Romulans first, kept trying to say something—something, I don’t know, but never quite got it out. Remember, I told you about it when it happened the first time?”

“Sulu?” Kirk echoed and his brave expression faded. “I hadn’t—you really think it could be her”

“I’m not sure about anything,” McCoy sighed. “I just mean that she came to me and was very concerned about this mission, and kept mentioning Chekov—”

“Who was the one who found Grax, remember?”

“And Mendelson was with him when he found that device,” she added. Something felt wrong about all this. If they looked too closely, everyone was beginning to appear as guilty, and it was going to paralyze them if they let it. They needed time to think about this rationally, a luxury they couldn’t afford.

Kirk pushed out a breath slowly, gathering his composure. “We need to bait whoever this is. We’re only going to go in circles like this. Right now, our main suspects are three people with a lot of trust and a lot of responsibility.”

“Your Section 31 is very meticulous,” McCoy said severely. “I don’t think they’d just fall into a trap.”

“Bones,” Kirk said affectionately and squeezed her shoulder, standing up to pace like a trapped lion. “Bones, we’re smarter than this. Section 31 thinks that I’m on their side and that your hands are going to be tied by doing the right thing for people, but we’ve got the upper hand.”

“Some upper hand,” she said and looked up at him from her place on the couch. “They’re right about me, at least. I’m not going to run off and break regulations and endanger people—”

“Wait,” Kirk interrupted. “You don’t have to. I _mean_ that we know what their motivations are and we can plan around that.”

Slowly, McCoy began to catch on to what he meant. “You mean that they’re bound to carry out this mission—to implicate the Romulans in a biological attack on a Federation colony.”

“And probably the murder of Commander Grax,” Kirk added. “But if their plan is to prevent any attempt to cure their pet disease and eliminate anyone in their way, then their next target should be...”

McCoy leaped to her feet. “Now wait just one minute, Jim,” she said loudly. “If you think I’m going to hang myself out there like a worm on a hook, you’ve got another think coming.”

His smile was a little predatory, but Kirk rested his hand on her shoulder. “Bones, I’m not going to let anything happen to you, I swear. But you’re their next likely target, especially if you announce that you finished the a vaccine and treatment and you’re going to deploy it to the planet immediately.”

“But it’s not finished yet. I’m not sure if the vaccine is stable enough, and the cure I developed isn’t...” McCoy trailed off and frowned. “I see what you mean.”

“I talked to Spock before I came here. Chapel said the vaccine passed every test she ran it through, well within your normal margins for error.” Kirk approached her console and looked it over meaningfully, then waited for her to follow him. “The treatment method is as sound as it’s going to get, and there are four-hundred people in critical condition who can’t wait to make sure your newest cure passes some theoretical computer model.”

“Jim, medicine doesn’t work like that,” she said and walked toward the console. “I can’t just jump in and hope for the best. I might make things worse for them.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Kirk laughed. McCoy heard a hint of the manic, boyish delight that she’d remembered in him from before, the very thing that had been stamped out of him by experiences like this one they were in. “Have a little faith in yourself. You’re the smartest doctor I know. Give the order.”

She shook her head and pressed her lips together, her conservative instinct to wait, hold back until it was a safe bet warring with his impulsive nature, just like always. Then McCoy groaned and walked toward the console without saying a word.

“Come on, Bones,” he said with quiet, trembling excitement as she typed in her access code and began to set up the comm link that would send their fledgling plan into motion. According to the computer, Gupta was still working in the laboratory, and McCoy hesitated only a few beats before choosing to establish communications with her directly.

Kirk set his hand next to hers on the console, their smallest fingers overlapping and McCoy looked up at him quickly from the screen. For a brief second, their eyes met and held and McCoy felt a fluttering in her stomach not at all unlike the swooping emptiness of dropping into a freefall. Kirk was dangerous to be around, but he was her best friend, as if that could encompass everything he was to her. And she trusted him.

Then McCoy moved her hand away and tapped the button that would establish the comm link to the laboratory. “Let’s catch ourselves a spy,” she said simply and looked down at the console.

*

Kirk left her quarters close to 0600, his uniform crumpled from planning through the night with her, and McCoy climbed wearily into her sonic shower. The sooner this was over, the sooner she’d be able to get some sleep again. She was clean several minutes before she shut off the shower, the aching in her sore muscles somewhat alleviated by the extra time, and then dressed in a fresh uniform. If things had gone according to plan, both vaccine and cure would be on their way to the planet that day. Hopefully, that would be enough to bait their murderer out of hiding.

She arrived at Laboratory Alpha with a cup of coffee already in hand and was greeted at the door by a solemn Mendelson.

“Doctor McCoy,” he said nervously and scuttled just out of her way when she approached the doors. “The laboratory—”

He didn’t need to finish once the doors opened and McCoy stepped inside her ruined laboratory, but he fell silent and stared at it next to her. Several computer consoles had been smashed and burned out by a phaser, the control panel to her office door was blown out and scorched with phaser fire, and several dozen datapadds were scattered across the floor. Some were cracked, and others simply abandoned on the floor. She set down her coffee cup on a table that had been cleared with one sweeping motion, the items that had previously been resting on it were piled on the floor next to it.

“What happened?” she snapped and walked straight for her office, pushing past the useless, half-opened door. Her office was a whirlwind of disaster, in far worse shape than the laboratory was.

“All our data on the vaccine—the cure you developed,” Mendelson stammered, looking warily around the room from the doorway. “All of it has been destroyed. We don’t—”

“We do,” she interrupted. “The _Enterprise_ has a back-up of all our research data.”

“I see,” Mendelson said faintly, giving her a watery smile of relief.

McCoy kicked her boot out and frowned when it sent one of her shattered datapadds skidding across the floor. She picked it up and sighed. Kirk had been right. She was obviously the next target, and whoever was responsible for the murders, the disease, everything—they had taken advantage of the perceived slip between Kirk and McCoy to destroy her work. And now McCoy had a good idea of who _they_ were.

“Doctor, there’s something else.” Mendelson stepped cautiously around her desk console, which was sparking dangerously. “Gupta was in the lab last night, since she was on duty...”

“I know,” McCoy said flatly and threw the datapadd onto her desk. “Where is she?”

“Tulla found her on the floor this morning. She was heavily drugged, she’s been unconscious since.”

McCoy walked past him, out of her office and the laboratory and approached one of the wall panels in the hallway. “McCoy to Kirk,” she said and waited for him to respond.

“Kirk here,” he answered sharply.

She looked over her shoulder at Mendelson and closed her eyes. “Bring a security team to Laboratory Alpha. The whole lab’s been trashed.”

Kirk whistled lowly. “Be right there. Kirk out.”

“Mendelson,” McCoy barked sharply, beckoning him back into the laboratory, where she lowered her voice. “We’re going to proceed with our plan to distribute. I’m going to have Commander Spock replicate the medicines and prepare them for transport.” She looked around the laboratory again. “You’ll need to prepare a shuttlecraft.”

“Doctor, you don’t mean you’re going to go ahead with this—”

“I mean that I want you to prepare the shuttlecraft. You did pretty well on basic piloting, didn’t you?”

“I did,” he confirmed and looked down.

“Good,” she sighed. “I didn’t. We’re going to go down together.”

Mendelson looked up at her again. She couldn’t blame him for being nervous about what was happening. It was his first assignment, he was still so young. “All right. I’ll prepare for that. When do we leave?”

“1500,” she answered automatically, and then squeezed his thin shoulder. “We did a good job up here,” she told him. “Now let’s make it count.”

“Yes, Doctor,” he said and left her there alone, staring at the destroyed laboratory.

Moments later, McCoy heard the sound of boots in the hallway and turned around to see Kirk and three security officers in the doorway.

“They did a really good job,” Kirk said quietly, stepping around a small heap of shattered glass.

McCoy looked at the security officers. “Lieutenant Gupta should be in a medical room down the hall, to the right. Fourth door. I want that room heavily guarded. She might be responsible for this.”

Kirk nodded curtly to them to confirm the order and kicked aside one of her medical tricorders that had been smashed on the floor. “Gupta did this?”

“Found this morning on the floor by Tulla, knocked out by God only knows what.” McCoy crossed her arms and walked toward him, lowering her voice. “She was on duty alone in this lab last night.”

“Can the station computers confirm no one else was in here? No one else could have come here, or seen?” Kirk ran his fingers over one of the ruined consoles. “I don’t mean to doubt your logic here, we were just saying last night that Gupta could have been responsible for all this. It’s just that...” He gestured at the destruction in the laboratory. “She’s a slight girl. Strong, probably, but not strong enough to smash a console like this. Spock could do this. Gupta, on the other hand...”

“I know,” McCoy said, swallowed the knot in her throat and crossed her arms. “If it wasn’t her, she’ll be able to tell us when she wakes up again. In the meantime, I told Mendelson to prepare a shuttlecraft to deliver our cure this afternoon, that Spock’s going to replicate what we need for them and we’ll give it to them ourselves. That story’ll get some attention.”

Kirk’s eyes gleamed when he removed his hand from the console. “But that’s not what you’re planning to do.”

“No,” McCoy admitted and frowned. She wasn’t made for this kind of intrigue, trying to strategically out-think everyone around her. It was why she’d liked medicine more than command jobs, why she had ultimately accepted the position on Starbase 84 instead of the one Kirk offered her on the _Enterprise._ “A shipment to the planet is conspicuous. If Gupta had any co-conspirators, if it was anyone else, we’ll know soon.”

“Bones,” Kirk laughed fondly. “That’s downright devious.”

“It’s smart thinking, that’s what it is,” she countered immediately, before realizing he’d meant it as a compliment. “I’ll go with the shuttlecraft. Can you still have Spock and Uhura set up that secure communications line with the doctors on the planet?”

“By this afternoon? No problem. They should already be working on it.”

“Good.” McCoy looked at her lab again and shook her head wearily. “There was a lot of other research in here, you know. Things I hadn’t finished, or hadn’t gotten very far on. Things that would have saved lives in other parts of the Federation.”

Kirk walked toward her and closed his hand around hers tightly. “Just take care of yourself,” he said, his voice cracking with earnest sincerity. “The research can be redone now that you’ve done it before, but they can’t do it without you.”

Her stomach tightened like before and McCoy quickly pulled her hand away from his. His expression was vulnerable and unguarded and she knew what he was going to try and say before he opened his mouth.

“Bones,” he began, reaching for her again, even when she shrugged her shoulder out of the way. “You know I—”

“Not now, Jim,” she said quickly and grabbed his hand to stop him. She had seen him at work before, falling quickly for a girl. Three years apart was plenty of time to reset his impressions of her from a cantankerous country doctor with a chip on her shoulder to a woman worth pursuing, and he had terrible timing for doing that. McCoy wasn’t ready for that, not from him. Not yet, at least.

“Later,” she insisted and released his hand when he nodded.

“Good luck, then,” he said in that same, affectionate voice from before. “Sounds like you’re the one who’s going in for the action this time.”

“Just cover my back while I’m in the line of fire.” McCoy led him into the hallway and sealed the laboratory behind them. “I’m not looking forward to it, trust me.”

“I’ll keep an eye on the rest of the station,” Kirk promised, his shoulders straightening with some kind of foolhardy bravado McCoy wished she could borrow from him. Then he was gone.

*

“The shuttle is ready for departure,” Mendelson announced with only a slight waver in his voice when McCoy stepped into the little cockpit. The ship was much larger than the ones she had trained in at the Academy, built for transport missions like these, but she suspected it would make her nauseous all the same. His hands moved quickly over the controls, going through the safety checks for the little ship while McCoy sat down. “The _Enterprise_ beamed our cargo over an hour ago.”

“Good,” McCoy said simply and stared at the controls in front of her. Mendelson would be doing the piloting, but McCoy needed to calm herself before the shuttlecraft took off. She could easily get spacesick at the best of times. In this case, they were going to be a deliberately easy target. Her hands found the controls in front of her while she reviewed the reports coming back from the station itself.

Several checks on Gupta had revealed that whatever she had injected herself with had been strong enough to render her unconscious for a long, long time, even while the medical staff was working to clear her system of it. It had taken the entire morning and all of the early afternoon before McCoy had received a report on Gupta. She would live, at least.

“Doctor? Are you okay?” Mendelson looked at her nervously and McCoy realized she hadn’t been paying full attention. “I was calling for you.”

“Yes,” she said simply and looked up at him. “What is it?”

“I asked if you were ready for departure.”

“Yes,” she said and looked down at the console, waiting for some reading to change, something drastic to happen as Mendelson powered up the engines. Nothing happened, and once the engines were humming smoothly beneath them and the shuttlebay was depressurized and ready for them to depart, she sat back into her chair. It was possible nothing would happen at all, and she had only gotten herself worked up for nothing.

“Take us to the Northern continent,” she ordered while the doors to the shuttlebay opened for them.

The station was behind them when McCoy finally felt herself begin to relax. “What’s our estimated arrival?” she asked and looked over at Mendelson, who had finished the input of their trajectory, but the readings on her screen were either wrong or hadn’t been fully transferred to her yet.

“Thirty minutes,” he said and then frowned at the console, his eyebrows knitting together into a line. “Doctor, I didn’t think we were bringing passengers.”

“We aren’t,” McCoy said sharply and stood up so she could see his console clearly, skimming over the status reports of the engines to the life support functions. There, on the screen, was a third life sign on the shuttle with them, an identified line next to McCoy and Mendelson’s. Gupta hadn’t been working alone.

“Keep us on track,” she ordered and opened the weapons locker near her own console, removing a phaser for herself and tossing one toward Mendelson, who fumbled to catch it. “Guard the cockpit, don’t let anyone in here.”

“Yes—yes, Doctor,” he stammered and stared nervously at the phaser before seeming to remember that he still had to monitor the ship’s autopilot.

When she had sealed the cockpit behind her, McCoy stared out into the larger cargo area of the ship and reached for her communicator before stopping herself. “Computer, lower lights,” she said, and looked around, walking slowly through the stacks of medical supplies. Some were real, things that the colony had recently requisitioned, but the fake stacks of medicines were in place, just as she and Kirk had planned.

When Kirk had first suggested the delivery, he had sincerely intended to bring the supplies, but McCoy had rejected it in favor of a direct transfer of the chemical makeup of the compounds. The colony, she had explained, had no lack of medical-grade replicators that could produce whatever quantities they needed. The shuttlecraft full of placebos was no more than a ploy to catch the accomplice Kirk suspected Gupta had.

A sudden flash of movement from the corner of her eye made McCoy whirl around and flip her phaser from a neutral setting to stun. Just as quickly, a bony hand closed over her mouth while the other knocked her phaser out of her hand and then dragged her bodily into the shadows between the tall stacks of medical supplies. McCoy scrambled for anything to grab onto, digging elbows wherever she could, until her attacker gave a low, pained grunt and removed their hand from her mouth.

“Doctor,” a familiar voice said urgently, and it took her a few very long seconds before she managed to place the clunky, heavily accented Standard in her memory and her eyes widened.

“Chekov,” she said, gasping for breath and shoving herself up to her feet. Chekov—as she and Kirk had discussed, it made sense...

“Doctor,” he repeated, perhaps a little more urgently than before, and grabbed her wrist tightly. He was holding a phaser of his own and was missing his commbadge, and his hair was sticking up at an odd angle, as if he had been shoved in one of the ducts before he emerged. “This is not what it seems,” he explained with that same serious expression, the shadowed darkness from before.

McCoy shook her head. “You’re Gupta’s associate. You’re—you were the one who killed Grax.”

“ _No,_ ” he said irritably and gripped her tighter, nodding toward the cockpit. The shuttlecraft gave a violent shudder that McCoy knew she couldn’t attribute to entry into the planet’s atmosphere, and she gripped one of the stacks tightly. “I had to find the explosive your pilot brought onboard earlier today.”

Blood pounded through McCoy’s ears, the only thing she could hear for a few, lightheaded seconds. “You—Mendelson?” she asked weakly and rapidly began tallying all the things that had happened, the even remote likelihood that stuttering, trembling Mendelson might have been responsible for any of the things that had happened on the station. “That’s not possible, you’re—”

“Lying?”

Chekov froze and McCoy didn’t think to freeze with him until an instant later, when she realized that it was Mendelson’s voice, absent any of the typical trembling she was used to from him.

When the two of them rose from between the stacks of medicine, McCoy saw Mendelson standing in the doorway of the cockpit, outlined in the brighter lights and the viewscreen filled with the planet’s ocean.

“It was you,” McCoy realized aloud, feeling Chekov working frantically at her side below Mendelson’s line of sight, concealing his phaser.

He had just adjusted the settings on it and lifted it when Mendelson lifted the phaser McCoy herself had given him and fired directly above his heart, just into his shoulder. Chekov was lucky, she realized immediately, that Mendelson was a medical researcher and not a security officer. His aim had been off just enough.

McCoy ducked below the stacks and pulled Chekov down with her, her hands searching for his wound immediately.

“Who’s piloting right now?” she called, feeling for Chekov’s pulse, and found that it was beating hard and frantic against her fingertips.

“Do _not_ let him get away,” Chekov breathed against her cheek when she leaned close to him. His breaths were erratic, broken by the occasional groan, but he thrust the phaser he had been carrying into her hand.

“Keep pressure on that, kid,” she whispered to him, pressing his hand into the wound.

“Doctor McCoy,” Mendelson said casually as his footsteps came closer to them. McCoy stood up and held the phaser as steadily as she could with Chekov groaning at her feet.

“You put a bomb on the shuttle?” she asked, grasping for anything to say and settling on what little she had managed to get out of Chekov before this.

“Ah,” he said and looked just over the stack at Chekov. “Your friend must have mentioned that, but I’m not sure how he would have known.”

“So you did. While you were preparing the ship for this.” McCoy looked past his shoulder, counting the steps to the console, deciding if she could knock him down and out of the way long enough to contact the station.

“Orders are orders, McCoy,” he said and smiled, as if he could read her mind and he knew just what she was thinking. “As you must know. Kirk was very effective with distracting you, at least for a while. Long enough to get this done.”

McCoy grit her teeth and lifted the phaser a little higher, aiming carefully for the arm holding the phaser and knowing well that her aim was little better than Mendelson’s had been when he shot Chekov. “You don’t know anything, do you?”

Mendelson smiled apologetically. “I am really sorry about all this, Doctor. I didn’t want to kill you. You’ve been a good officer. I _like_ you. Now put down that phaser.”

“That’s some consolation, Mendelson,” McCoy said bitingly. She had begun to move her fingers, square her firing position, when Mendelson took another step toward her menacingly. “Commander Grax was a good officer, too, and you didn’t mind killing her. Gupta, too, and you certainly tried, didn’t you? You won’t mind if I don’t take your liking me as much comfort.”

“Gupta was unfortunate, I agree, but she’s as good as dead. Commander Grax was a Romulan sympathizer,” Mendelson spat at her. “A traitor to the Federation. I was _happy_ to kill her. Did you ever figure it out? How I killed her? That it was me all along?”

“In time, maybe I’d have had time to put it together.” Feeding Mendelson’s ego was probably a sure way to distract him, but the smug look of self-satisfaction at his own cleverness made McCoy feel like her chest was going to burst with rage.

“But you didn’t,” he crooned and held out a hand for her phaser. “Give me the phaser. We’re all going to die here anyway. I’m very grateful that you gave me the opportunity to make sure that the creator of this cure dies with it.”

“You forgot about the _Enterprise_ ,” Chekov growled at him from the floor, blood seeping from his shoulder through his fingers. McCoy was momentarily pleased to see that he had at least listened to her.

“A computer virus should take care of the systems aboard the _Enterprise_ shortly,” Mendelson explained. He even sounded _cheerful_ , pleased at his own victory. “By the time this shuttle explodes—a mysterious systems failure, naturally—and all of us are dead, the virus will take effect. Saunaed Sidemen will be unchecked long enough for the Romulan suspicions to reach Starfleet Command, thanks to your reports to the admiralty, Doctor. The doctors at Starfleet Medical will _somehow_ manage to develop a cure, a vaccine, and stop it before it reaches the inner Federation planets, and—”

“And war breaks out between the Federation and the Romulan Empire,” McCoy finished for him savagely. “I know, I heard the whole plan from Kirk.”

“Kirk?” For the first time since he’d entered the cargo area, Mendelson looked genuinely shocked, his thin mouth hanging open a little. “Kirk is a member of—”

McCoy didn’t allow herself the luxury of interrupting him to tell him that he was wrong. Instead, she took one last step toward him, all the distance that was left between them, knocked his phaser arm askew and thrust the heel of her hand up into his nose, twisting around and grabbing the phaser from his hand while he fired it wildly. One shot grazed her neck, and the other her leg, but McCoy finally twisted it out of his grip and slammed her elbow into his chest. She was rewarded with the sound of all the air rushing from Mendelson’s chest, and pointed the phaser at him, flipping it quickly to stun and firing.

“Good shot,” Chekov said dryly from behind the stack of supplies, and stood up with his knees shaking.

“I don’t need any lip from you, kid,” she said and pushed it into his hand. Why _had_ Chekov been on the shuttlecraft to start with? Was it at all related to Sulu’s reports of strange behavior, just some display of foolhardy eagerness to prove himself?

“Keep that pointed at him, stun him again if he wakes up before we get back to the station.” McCoy began limping weakly toward the cockpit, her the pain in her calf swinging between the sharp burn of phaser fire and a deeper ache that throbbed up her entire leg.

Chekov followed her weakly, even when he had to keep his back toward her to keep the phaser sights on Mendelson’s prone body, and then leaned his his weight against the doorway. The shuttle gave another violent shudder and even as McCoy braced herself against the shaking console, she jammed her fingers into the buttons and felt her heart leap when the computer took a few beats too long to connect before the lights on the communications display flashed green.

“McCoy to _Enterprise_ ,” she said in a strained voice. “Three for emergency beam-out, immediately.”

“Doctor,” Chekov interrupted, leaning his head into the cockpit with a panicked frown. “The bomb—the medicine—”

“Is completely safe,” she answered, looking over her shoulder, waiting for the response from the _Enterprise._ It felt like it was taking forever, far too long. “The data was transmitted to the planet hours ago. The doctors down there should be treating their patients with it by now.”

“Shuttlecraft—McCoy, do you hear me now?” A crackling voice—Commander Scott’s, she realized—came in through the communications system, and McCoy exchanged a relieved expression with Chekov.

“Clearly, Scotty,” Chekov called from the doorway. “Can you get on with—”

“Emergency beam-out,” came the response in humored tones, and then: “I’ve got your signals.”

Behind Chekov, Mendelson dematerialized, then Chekov. Then, finally, McCoy felt the tug of the transporter and closed her eyes to the quaking shuttle. It was over. It was _over_.

*

“Gupta woke up.”

McCoy was in her own office again two days later, cleaning up the remains of the mess Mendelson had made of it when Kirk leaned inside the open doorway. The door had been removed to make way for a repair crew that would have to replace the panel outside, and though the office itself was largely useless to her now, McCoy couldn’t help but go there to try and escape the chaos of the last few days.

Nothing was the same on the station. It was like all of its life had been sucked out with Grax’s death and Mendelson’s betrayal, though neither of them had been the thing holding it all together. For McCoy, though, maybe the whirlwind of adventure had left her feeling unsatisfied and caged on the station, more lonely and homesick than ever.

Admirals Archer and Pike had left Earth for Starbase 84 shortly after McCoy and Kirk had filed an initial, joint report, and the station had been preparing for them since then. Mendelson’s computer virus had struck the _Enterprise_ ’s computer systems an hour after she, Chekov, and Mendelson had been beamed back aboard and treated for their various injuries. Since then, the station’s engineering crews had split themselves between the various damage to the station from the past week and the reconfiguring of the systems aboard the _Enterprise._

McCoy stood up and frowned, setting down one of her less-damaged datapadds, which she had been working on. “When?” Gupta’s recovery had been touch-and-go for a while, after McCoy had discovered that Mendelson had infected her with Saunaed Sidemen as one last parting gift in the hypospray that had knocked her out.

“About twenty minutes ago,” Kirk said and came inside with a faint smile. “She confirmed that Mendelson attacked her in the lab the other night.”

“The charges against him grow ever longer,” she sighed. “And what about Sulu—or Chekov, for that matter. I’m still not clear about what the hell he was doing.”

“Aha,” he said and sat on the edge of her desk, next to where she was standing. “Starfleet Intelligence recruited Chekov a year ago when we had some Klingon ambassador on the ship. I didn’t know then. Apparently Pike contacted him again when Komack sent the order for the _Enterprise_ to come here. Since he and Sulu are—well, you know, they don’t do much without the other—I think he asked her for help.”

McCoy’s eyebrows rose. “That’s impressive. I should feel sorry I called him kid on the shuttle.”

“You won’t, though, you grumpy cuss,” Kirk said fondly, and his hand reached out for McCoy’s. This time, she let him have it. “And, before you ask, I haven’t heard from Section 31 since I got here. I was never much of a sure thing for them, for the same reasons I was a gamble for Starfleet to take me. I just do my own thing.”

“I thought as much,” she sighed. “I… I think what they must have done to accomplish all the things they did, and it makes me so angry every time. Mendelson casually murdered Grax, and she… she was a good woman.”

“He seemed to thinks she was a Romulan collaborator.”

“He wasn’t the first to think so,” McCoy said fiercely. “She wasn’t, you know. She just really believed in peace, and making things right, and lived and died trying to make that possible, because she loved the Federation. It was—it was her home, just like it is for you, or for me.”

Kirk was quiet for a few moments, and then he turned her hand over with his own and dragged his thumb across her palm. “Do you miss Earth?”

“Don’t ask me that,” she said bitterly. He had been there the morning she went to San Francisco and enlisted, had been there all the years of the Academy she had lamented leaving Earth, her daughter, her _home._ “You know I miss it. I just… I can’t quit here. I’ve worked too hard at this Starfleet thing to just give it up and go home.”

“You could take a position with Starfleet Medical, and you know it,” he argued, even when McCoy shook her head. Their eyes rose from their clasped hands at the same time and Kirk smiled, the warm spark of life in his lively eyes just the way she remembered it.

“What if I offered you CMO post on the _Enterprise_ again instead?” he suggested without allowing her time to refute it. “Same job as before. You aren’t cut out to be an administrator on a station out here. You’ll see more of the quadrant, be in more danger sometimes, but Bones— _Bones_ , you belong there, not tied down in a lab without ever seeing home, or Joanna.”

Her mouth tightened with a surge of emotion that she hadn’t expected. “That’s playing dirty, Jim, bringing up Jo at a time like this. You had selfish reasons for wanting me on your crew three years ago, too.”

“I’m persistent. I don’t like taking no for an answer,” he said and smiled at her. “What do you think?”

“I think,” she began slowly and reached for the datapadd she had been working on before, thrusting it into Kirk’s hand so he could see what she had been looking at when he had arrived. “I think that Admiral Pike already has my transfer request. He’ll want to discuss your plans for your current CMO when he arrives here tomorrow.”

“You’re serious.” Kirk removed his hand from hers and scrolled through it quickly. “Lenore H. McCoy, Lieutenant Commander, requesting—Chief Medical Officer of the USS _Enterprise_ —you’re serious.”

“I could get into the details about it,” she offered hesitantly, because she didn’t really want to. Not then, at least, with a hundred reasons why she wanted to leave Starbase 84 and at least as many why she wanted the _Enterprise_ instead. “But I’m serious.”

Kirk’s laugh was a sudden bark of sound, and he set down the datapadd. “Well, Commander McCoy, welcome aboard.” Then he pulled her up so she was standing with him and embraced her tightly, his nose buried somewhere in her tangled hair, her face pressed against his shoulder. “Glad to have you back, Bones.”

“Same to you, Jim,” McCoy sighed, hoped that it could be this easy just to let it go and knew it wasn’t. Too much had happened between them, between her and the station itself, and McCoy couldn’t let it go so simply. She’d never been that kind of woman, to accept things and move on.

“It’s just not that easy,” she added with a stifled shudder. She’d given her best and in the end it had been just enough; just _barely_ enough to cover for the mistakes and failures she’d made along the way.

Kirk didn’t say anything at first, but something in him—the way he shifted his weight to support hers a little better, the hand that closed into a fist around her hair, even the slightest shaking in his chest—told her more clearly than words that he understood.


End file.
